Harald Bugmann was Assistant Professor of Mountain Forest Ecology from 1999 to 2004. Since October 2004 he is Associate Professor of Forest Ecology at ETH Zurich.Born on April 11, 1965, he studied systematics and ecological biology at ETH in Zurich. After a M.Sc. in limnology, he obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Hannes Fluhler and Dr. Andreas Fischlin at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology of ETH, dealing with the impacts of climatic change on mountain forests in the Alps. His dissertation was awarded the silver medal of ETH in 1994. From 1994 to 1998, he worked on the regional impacts of climatic change at the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany. In 1998/99, he did research on the ecology of Rocky Mountain forests at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research in Boulder (Colorado, USA).His main research interests are in the long-term dynamics of forest ecosystems under environmental change, successional dynamics in near-natural forests and questions on the scaling of ecological information. He is involved in various parts of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and, among others, coordinates the "IGBP Mountain Initiative".