About the Authors

Forests & Global Climate Change:
Potential Impacts on U.S. Forest Resources

Authors

Dr. Herman H. Shugart
University of Virginia

Herman H. Shugart is the W.W. Corcoran Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. Prior to joining the University of Virginia in his current capacity in 1984, he worked for 13 years in Tennessee – eventually as a Senior Research Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and as a Professor in Botany at the Graduate Program in Ecology at the University of Tennessee. Dr. Shugart has also served as a Visiting Fellow in the Australian National University (1978-1979, 1993-1994), in Australia’s Commonwealth Industrial and Scientific Research Organization, Division of Land Use Research (1982) and Division of Wildlife and Ecology (1993-1994), in the International Meteorological Institute at the University of Stockholm, Sweden (1984), and in the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria (1987,1989).

Dr. Shugart has served on the editorial board of several scholarly journals including Ecology, Ecological Monographs, Annual Reviews in Ecology and Systematics, Biological Conservation, Landscape Ecology, Journal of Vegetation Science, Forest Science, Global Change Biology, and The Australian Journal of Botany. He is the author of 300 publications including 12 books, 65 book chapters and 114 papers in peer-reviewed journals. A recent book, Terrestrial Ecosystems in Changing Environments was published in 1998 by Cambridge University Press, which reviews the ecological issues of predicting responses to global and regional climatic change. Recent honors include his election, as a foreign member, to the Russian Academy of Sciences in recognition of his work in Forest Ecology (2001); his designation as the 1999 Distinguished Alumnus from his alma mater, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Arkansas; and his identification as a Highly Cited author (top 1/2 percentile of scientific citations) in the area of Ecology/Environment by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Dr. Shugart received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Zoology at the University of Arkansas and received his Ph.D. (also in Zoology) from the University of Georgia in 1971.

 

Roger A. Sedjo
Resources for the Future

Dr. Sedjo is a Senior Fellow and the Director of the Forest Economics and Policy Program at Resources for the Future (RFF), a Washington based policy research organization, and the President of the Environmental Literacy Council (ELC), a nonprofit environmental education group. Dr. Sedjo has written extensively on forest and environmental issues, both domestic and international, having authored or edited fourteen books related to forestry, natural resources and the environment. His early work focused on timber supply and forest plantation issues, while more recent work is devoted more to the environmental aspects of forests.

Dr. Sedjo has served on a number of scientific panels and was a member of the Secretary of Agriculture’s Committee of Scientists, which made recommendations on Forest Service planning, and edited a recent book, A Vision for the US Forest Service (2000). He was a co-Chair of the chapter on “biological carbon sinks” in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (2001). He was also a contributor to two chapters in the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report (1995 ). Additionally, he has worked for the past several years with the Japanese Government in assessing their options toward meeting their carbon targets under the Kyoto Protocol. Recently, he has completed a study for the Department of Energy that resulted in the report, Estimating Carbon Supply Curves for Global Forests and Other Land Uses (with Brent Sohngen and Robert Mendelsohn). In addition, his recent papers on climate change have been featured in Bulletin of the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, Journal of Agricultural and Resources Economics, and Environment Science and Policy.

Dr. Sedjo has been a consultant to a wide array of organizations including the World Bank, the Global Environmental Facility, the Asian Development Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development, the OECD, Harvard Institute for International Development and others. Dr. Sedjo earned his B.A. and M.S. degrees at the University of Illinois, and a Ph.D. at the University of Washington (Seattle).

 

Dr. Brent L. Sohngen
The Ohio State University

Brent Sohngen is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at The Ohio State University. Prior to his appointment at Ohio State in 1996, he was a Gilbert White Postdoctoral Fellow at Resources For the Future in Washington, D.C.

His primary research interests lie in modeling land-use and land-cover change, examining impacts of climate change in the forestry sector, and the economics of nonpoint source pollution. Dr. Sohngen also leads an extension and outreach program in environmental and natural resource economics. The program focuses on linking research on natural resource and environmental economics to natural resource policy and management issues in the state of Ohio.

He obtained a bachelor’s degree from the Department of Agricultural Economics at Cornell University in 1991, and a doctorate from Yale University in 1996.