Vincenzo Saponaro

Vincenzo Saponaro has a master in Ecobiology at the University of Rome (la Sapienza). He worked at the Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment (DAFE) of the University of Pisa in a project focused mostly on advancing the concept of hyperspectral phenotyping of plant stress, across a range of plant species and over a variety of stressors. He earned his Ph.D in Forest Ecology at the University of Tuscia (Viterbo) and at the CNR ISAFOM of Perugia, studying the relationship between carbon and water fluxes and forest management strategies in boreal forests. In particular, he focused on Gross Primary Production (GPP), Evapotranspiration (ET) and Intrinsic Water Use Efficiency (iWUE) of beech-dominated forests, and on how silvicultural strategies, together with climate change, can influence forest ecosystem dynamics across Europe. During his PhD, he also developed some subroutines for the 3D-CMCC-FEM forest model, such as natural regeneration (from seed to adult tree), the calculation of iWUE, and other small code improvements. He also learned to use the process-based model MEDFATE (from CREAF, Spain) to simulate fluxes and drought stress dynamics. He is currently working as a post-doc at the University of Bolzano, spatializing the output of the 3D-CMCC-FEM model to generate high-resolution maps of GPP, ET, Net Primary Production (NPP), and other forest variables, using machine learning algorithms such as Random Forest (RF), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB), and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), with remote sensing data and the National Forest Inventory (NFI) as predictors. He is fascinated by science and its power, he fights for Nature and Human Rights, and believes in the role of sport in raising awareness and facing daily challenges.