David Beerling
| David Beerling | |
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David Beerling in 2014
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| Born | David John Beerling 21 June 1965 Tunbridge Wells |
| Residence | Great Longstone, Derbyshire |
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| Alma mater | University of Wales, College of Cardiff (BSc, PhD) |
| Thesis | The ecology and control of Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica Houtt.) and Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera Royle.) on river banks in South Wales (1990) |
| Doctoral advisor | Ron Walter Edwards |
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| Known for | The Emerald Planet |
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| Spouse | Juliette Dawn Fraser (m. 2011) |
| Children | Joshua |
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David John Beerling FRS (born 21 June 1965) is the Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Climate change mitigation and Sorby Professor of Natural Sciences in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences (APS) at the University of Sheffield, UK.
Beerling was educated at the University of Wales, College of Cardiff where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Botany in 1987 followed by a PhD in 1990 for research into the biogeography, ecology and control of two important and highly invasive alien plant species Japanese knotweeed Reynoutria japonica and Himalayan balsam Impatiens glandulifera. His PhD was supervised by Ron Walter Edwards CBE and he authored two ecological monographs on these importance species and scientific papers reporting simulated projections of their potential future distributions in Europe with global climate change.
Beerling's research group investigate fundamental questions concerning the conquest of the land by plants and the role of terrestrial ecosystems in shaping Earth's global ecology, climate and atmospheric composition. This is achieved by approaches that integrate evidence from fossils, experiments and theoretical models applied across spatial and temporal scales. Increasingly, his group's research discoveries are informing our understanding of current global climate change issues.
An important early success of his biophysical approach to palaeobotany was the discovery of evidence for a substantial increase in the atmospheric CO₂ concentration and ‘super-greenhouse’ conditions across the Triassic-Jurassic (Tr-J) boundary, 200 million years ago, based on analyses of fossil stomata and leaf morphology from Greenland. This causally linked a catastrophic extinction event with the break-up of Pangaea. Before his group’s work, the Tr-J extinction represented one of the most poorly understood of the so-called ‘big-five’ mass extinctions in the Phanerozoic (past 540 million years). His paper resulted in major new international research programmes that subsequently identified evidence confirming the carbon cycle perturbation in marine and terrestrial sediments world-wide. He extended this discovery by evaluating hypothesized causal mechanisms with numerical geochemical carbon cycle modeling in collaboration with the Yale University geochemist Robert Berner.
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