Dr Andrew Hacket Pain BA, PhD

Personal Statement

I am an ecologist focused on understanding and predicting the impact of global environmental change on forests. I principally work on tree reproduction and forest regeneration, particularly the ecology of seed masting. I am interested in understanding how plants regulate variability in reproductive effort, and how they synchronise this variability over space and time. My current work is focused on understanding how masting is responding to environmental change and predicting what this will mean for the dynamics of forest ecosystems. I manage a four-decade programme that monitors masting in European beech, and lead the coordination of a global network of researchers contributing to an open-access database of time-series of plant reproduction (MASTREE+). I also work on forest and tree growth, using tree rings to monitor forest responses to climate change, and to predict the resilience of forests to drought and other stresses.