Victor Van der Meersch
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vvandermeersch.bsky.social
Victor Van der Meersch
@vvandermeersch.bsky.social
Freshly minted PhD in forest ecology and modeling (CEFE, CNRS, Montpellier)
Postdoc in Lizzie Wolkovich lab at UBC (Vancouver)
#globalchangecology #forest #modeling #phenology
Great week in New York with @lizzieinvancouver.bsky.social! We had inspiring discussions with @betanalpha.bsky.social and @dustybowl.bsky.social on tree growth modeling. Thanks for sharing so many ideas. Excited to move this project forward!
October 22, 2025 at 1:19 PM
Reposted by Victor Van der Meersch
Our department at UBC is hiring for a professor of forest ecophysiology, including "tree ecophysiology; plant abiotic or biotic stress physiology; forest mortality and climate change responses; forest carbon balance; tree water relations; or nutrient use." Learn more at: tinyurl.com/5da56f5c
October 6, 2025 at 10:12 PM
Working with @lizzieinvancouver.bsky.social is not just about doing cool science, it’s also about mind-blowing cultural discoveries like Jiffy Pop (for a European like me)

📷 @christopherd98.bsky.social
@temporalecology.bsky.social
July 31, 2025 at 4:37 PM
Reposted by Victor Van der Meersch
Did you hear that I'll be teaching four brand new remote courses this year covering Bayesian mixture modeling, survival modeling, pairwise comparison modeling, and ordinal modeling, www.eventzilla.net/e/advanced-b...?

Reskeets and sharing with your friends and colleges appreciated!
Advanced Bayesian Modeling In Stan
Despite the promise of big data, inferences are often limited not by the size of data but rather by…
www.eventzilla.net
July 11, 2025 at 3:26 PM
Reposted by Victor Van der Meersch
Thanks to @betanalpha.bsky.social @vvandermeersch.bsky.social and Janneke Hille Ris Lambers for a fun day discussing how trees grow at Mount Rainier in Mount Rainier NP to round out June! And to all of them plus Mao and Avery for more math at UW (see gcecology.tumblr.com/post/7877335...).
July 7, 2025 at 4:26 AM
Reposted by Victor Van der Meersch
The summer solstice may signal peak growth for many plants. On average, the summer solstice coincides with a thermal optimum during the growing season. As the climate warms, this cue could remain stable, but there’s significant local variation. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
June 17, 2025 at 4:23 PM
Several recent studies suggest the summer solstice might act as a universal cue for key plant processes.
But why would the longest day of the year be so important? Our new study in @pnas.org sheds some light on this question ⏬
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
@lizzieinvancouver.bsky.social
June 12, 2025 at 4:06 PM
New PhD position in the Temporal Ecology Lab (UBC, Vancouver)! 🌲
The student will investigate how seed and seedling pathogens influence forest regeneration and diversity, in collaboration with the Plant Ecology Group at ETHZ.
Please find more information here: temporalecology.org/wp-content/u...
June 11, 2025 at 8:00 AM
Reposted by Victor Van der Meersch
New research by Wolkovich and colleagues highlights spatial and temporal complexities in the impacts of climate change on wine grapes around the world

journals.plos.org/climate/arti...

@vvandermeersch.bsky.social @dustybowl.bsky.social

Photo: Marc Benedetti, Pixabay
May 22, 2025 at 9:28 AM
How can we spread the use of process-based models in ecology? They are powerful but require a lot of data. Inverse calibration offers a shortcut—adjusting parameters using species distribution data. But do we still get biologically realistic results? ⏬
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Can inverse calibration help improving process-explicit species distribution models?
Process-explicit models (PEMs) are expected to provide reliable projections of species range shifts because they explicitly model the biological mecha…
www.sciencedirect.com
May 8, 2025 at 7:05 AM
📄 For French speakers passing by, or those who want to work on their French, a short analysis of my PhD thesis has been published on the website of the Academy of Agriculture (and forests?).
You can find it here (en français, donc):
www.academie-agriculture.fr/publications...
Analyses de thèse | Académie d'Agriculture de France
www.academie-agriculture.fr
March 28, 2025 at 11:43 PM
Ever wondered how reliable species distribution models (SDMs) are in the face of climate change compared to more mechanistic approaches? We did too, and our results are now published in Ecology Letters ⏬
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Paleorecords Reveal Biological Mechanisms Crucial for Reliable Species Range Shift Projections Amid Rapid Climate Change
Climate change has created an urgent need for reliable projections of species distributions. By hindcasting forest tree range shifts across Europe over the last 12,000 years, we show that process-exp...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
March 7, 2025 at 2:08 AM
Reposted by Victor Van der Meersch
Interesting work by van der Meersch et al. out in Ecology Letters, nicely illustrating that process-based models are more robust than correlative models for predicting species distributions under novel climatic conditions doi.org/10.1111/ele....
Paleorecords Reveal Biological Mechanisms Crucial for Reliable Species Range Shift Projections Amid Rapid Climate Change
Climate change has created an urgent need for reliable projections of species distributions. By hindcasting forest tree range shifts across Europe over the last 12,000 years, we show that process-exp...
doi.org
February 24, 2025 at 6:16 AM