International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, IEAS

Academician

Anatoly Shvidenko

Profile:

Elected Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences on 14 August 2015, Professor Anatoly Zinovievich Shvidenko is a distinguished Russian-Ukrainian forest scientist and an internationally recognised scholar of boreal forest ecology, carbon accounting, and the impacts of global change on Northern Eurasian ecosystems. Born on 20 September 1937 in Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine, he received his forestry degree from the National Agricultural University of Ukraine and subsequently studied Applied Mathematics and Probability Theory at Kyiv State University. He earned his Candidate of Science (Ph.D.) degree in 1968 for research on the mathematical modelling of forest growth and productivity, followed by his Doctor of Biological Sciences degree in 1982. From 1968 to 1987, he served at the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, where he headed the Department of Forest Inventory and Planning. In 1992, he joined the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, where he currently serves as Guest Emeritus Research Scholar, while also holding a position as Principal Investigator at the V.N. Sukachev Institute of Forest, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in Krasnoyarsk. He served as Lead Author and Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC Second, Third, and Fourth Assessment Reports and shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the IPCC. He is also a founding and board member of the International Boreal Forest Research Association (IBFRA), an Academician of the Ukrainian Forestry Academy, and an Honorary Professor of the Ukrainian National Agricultural University.

Back to list page →

Professor Shvidenko’s research has focused on forest inventory and monitoring, mathematical modelling, carbon-budget assessment, and the evaluation of ecosystem services in boreal and temperate forests, with particular emphasis on the forests of Russia, Siberia, and Ukraine. By developing comprehensive and validated carbon-accounting frameworks and applying fuzzy-system approaches to uncertainty assessment, he has advanced understanding of the role of Northern Eurasian forests as a major and persistent carbon sink, the climatic regulation of forest–tree symbioses, and the capacity of boreal ecosystems to adapt to global environmental change. His selected works address growth and productivity models for the major forest-forming species of Northern Eurasia, uncertainty in comprehensive carbon accounting for policy-making, the persistent carbon sink represented by the world’s forests, climatic controls on decomposition and the global biogeography of forest–tree symbioses, and the health of boreal forests under global change. Collectively, these contributions reflect a sustained research programme connecting quantitative forest science with large-scale assessments of carbon dynamics, ecosystem resilience, and the evidence base required for sustainable management of the world’s boreal forests.