Ylva van Meeningen

I work as a research coordinator for Sustainability Forum and for the Agenda 2030 Graduate School. My responsibilities lie within coordinating collaborations and common events, creating and maintaining strategic relations, course administration, practical details with meetings and conferences, budget updates and webpage administration.

Sustainability Forum at sustainability.lu.se

I have previously worked as a research administrator for the graduate research school ClimBEco and for the PhD student education at CEC. I have also worked as a research communicator for ICOS Sweden and developed educational material about climate for high school kids.

I am a doctor in Physical geography and ecosystem science and I did research on biogenic volatile organic trace gases (BVOCs) from oak, beech and spruce and in what ways their emissions are affected by either climate or genetic variation. 

Most plants release BVOCs (which stands for Biogenic Volatile Organic Compounds) which are thousands of different compounds that give each plant its characteristic smell. To the plant, these BVOCs have different benefits, such as decreasing the leaf temperature, attract predators to insect herbivores and is even used as a way of communication from tree to tree. But once they are released into the air, they react with other compounds in various ways. Some compounds can lead to the production of smog or prolong the lifetime of other greenhouse gases, whilst other compounds in cleaner air produce clouds which blocks out incoming solar radiation which would otherwise heat up the planet's surface. These processes are known to happen simultaneously, but it is unknown how big of an impact each of them has.

In my work, I have looked at genetically identical trees grown at various locations in Europe in order to further our understanding on how the emission patterns might look like for common European tree species and how the patterns are affected by climate.