Laura Bentley

I am interested in how we adapt landscapes to our needs, and how we can make those landscapes work for us and the wider environment long-term. Increasing forest cover is widely known to affect carbon storage and biodiversity, but less known are its interactions with hydrology. The Mediterranean is facing increasing climatic uncertainty as a result of climate change and I am asking what the effects of forest regeneration will be for water security in this context, using a combination of remote sensing data and field measurements, to pick apart historic trends.

Publication
Partial river flow recovery with forest age is rare in the decades following establishment. Bentley and Coomes, Global Change Biology, Jan 2020.
DOI: 10.1111/gcb.14954