Organization: University of Geneva

Based in Geneva

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Title(s)

Professor, Institute for Environmental Sciences (ISE)

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Anthony Lehmann is a professor at the Institute for Environmental Sciences (ISE) at the University of Geneva.

Anthony Lehmann was a pioneer in the field of Species Distribution Modeling (SDM) when he published and made available the first package (GRASP) to build spatial predictions from point observations of plant and animal distributions. His approach was cited more than 400 times since its original publication and was used in a variety of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, with more than 20 publications in which he was co-author. GRASP was followed by many similar packages such as MAXENT, BIOMOD or CARET. GRASP was also used to address for the first time the problem of presence-only data in species distribution modeling. GRASP was improved in 2006 by incorporating the spatial auto-correlation into the predictions. Anthony was also the co-author of the most often cited paper on SDM in which he was responsible for the models using Generalized Additive Models (GAMs). GAMs were used by the author to assess Swiss breeding birds’ vulnerability to climate change together with other regression methods.

More recently, the work of Anthony has been concentrating on the use of hydrological modeling outputs to inform decision-making. As the initiator and coordinator of a large FP7 research project called enviroGRIDS, During four years he, along with more than a hundred scientists, explored the gaps between scientific information and decision making in the Black Sea Catchment. The aim of the project was also to build capacity on Earth Observation and data sharing approaches. A central piece of the enviroGRIDS project was the calibration of a very large and complex hydrological model for the entire Black Sea catchment. Anthony Lehmann was also work package leader in another FP7 European project called ACQWA  on Assessing climate impacts on the quantity and quality of water on alpine rivers (e.g. Rhône).

Since the end of the enviroGRIDS project in 2013, Anthony is orienting his research on spatially-explicit Ecosystem Services assessment. In 2014, he visited Stanford University for two months while collaborating with NatCap, and recently finished organizing and hosting the first InVEST training in Switzerland. One of the developers of InVEST started a Ph.D. on ES under his supervision. He is also the Associate Editor on the journal Environmental Sciences and Policy. In addition, he participated in the organization of a new MOOC on Ecosystem Services and will be leading the organization of the INTECOL conference in Geneva in 2021.