Vincent Buness

I joined the Department of Forest Ecology and Management as a PhD student in 2023.
My overarching interest is how forestry practices affect ecosystem services. Biodiversity is my focal lens, but I approach it together with ecosystem resource dynamics (light, nutrients, structural complexity) and carbon cycling.
My current work combines field surveys, sequencing of fungal communities, LiDAR-derived forest structure metrics and soil chemistry to disentangle the mechanisms linking management and multi-taxon diversity.
I am also part of an international team quantifying ecosystem carbon stocks in managed and natural forests in the country of Georgia, bridging policy-relevant carbon accounting with biodiversity conservation.

Research (areas & methods)

• Disturbance ecology and forest succession
• Multi-taxon biodiversity (plants / fungi / beetles)
• Ecosystem carbon storage and nutrient cycling
• Forest structural complexity (Terrestrial laser scanning)
• Generalized additive models, mixed models and community ordination in R

• Silviculture course (SLU, Umeå) – assessed and provided in-depth feedback on MSc students’ research-proposal drafts.
• Forest Ecosystems Ecology (SLU) – group leader guiding a student team through the entire research cycle, from study design to data analysis and oral presentation.
  B.Sc. thesis supervision (SLU, 2024 – 25) – primary adviser for a thesis on beetle diversity in northern Swedish pine forests.
• Introduction to Soil Science – Field Course (Technical University of Munich) – led undergraduate field exercises on soil description, sampling and classification.
• Fundamentals of Field Soil Science – exam-oriented practical days, led undergraduate field exercises on soil description, sampling and classification.
• Spring School on Soils & Soil Survey (Tbilisi, Georgia, 2024) – invited instructor for intensive course on soil profiling, carbon-stock assessment and field mapping within the Georgian carbon-stocks project.

Buness, V., Sundqvist, M.K., Ali, S.T., Annighöfer, P., Aragon, C.M., Lanzrein, I., Metcalfe, D.B., Nilsson, M.-C., & Gundale, M.J. (2025).
Resource quantity and heterogeneity drive successional plant diversity in managed and unmanaged boreal forests. Ecography, 48(7), e07676.
https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.07676

Gundale, M.J., Axelsson, E.P., Buness, V., Callebaut, T., DeLuca, T.H., Hupperts, S.F., Ibáñez, T.S., Metcalfe, D.B., Nilsson, M.-C., … et al. (2024).
The biological controls of soil carbon accumulation following wildfire and harvest in boreal forests: A review. Global Change Biology, 30(9), e17276.
https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.17276

Garcia-Franco, N., Wiesmeier, M., Buness, V., Berauer, B.J., Schuchardt, M.A., Jentsch, A., Schlingmann, M., Andrade-Linares, D., Wolf, B., Kiese, R., Dannenmann, M., & Kögel-Knabner, I. (2024).
Rapid loss of organic carbon and soil structure in mountainous grassland topsoils induced by simulated climate change. Geoderma, 441, 116807.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2024.116807

Schmied, G., Hilmers, T., Mellert, K.-H., Uhl, E., Buness, V., Ambs, D., Steckel, M., Biber, P., Šeho, M., Hoffmann, Y.-D., & Pretzsch, H. (2023).
Nutrient regime modulates drought response patterns of three temperate tree species. Science of the Total Environment, 901, 161601.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.161601

Garcia-Franco, N., Walter, R., Wiesmeier, M., Buness, V., Berauer, B.J., & Kögel-Knabner, I. (2021).
Biotic and abiotic controls on carbon storage in aggregates in calcareous alpine and prealpine grassland soils. Biology and Fertility of Soils, 57, 203–218.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00374-020-01518-0