Gina Marano

About me

I am a forester and forest ecologist with a strong background in process-based modelling and silviculture. My work aims to assess how abiotic stress — above all drought and climate extremes — and biotic disturbances such as bark beetles and management interact and affect the growth, mortality and long-term dynamics of temperate forests. The goal is to:

1. Understand the processes that lead to forest stress and tree death.
2. Design management scenarios and simulations to assess their potential outcomes.
3. Support foresters with decisions grounded in both field and modelling expertise.

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Resource Analysis research group of the Swiss National Forest Inventory at WSL in Birmensdorf. I am also an associate scientist at the Forest Modelling Lab of CNR-ISAFOM in Italy, and a lecturer at ETH Zurich. I completed my PhD in Forest Ecology at ETH Zurich with Prof. Harald Bugmann, where I developed and tested new versions of the forest gap model ForClim to capture how long-term predisposition, acute drought and biotic agents combine to kill trees — and used them to reproduce the recent dieback of beech and spruce in Switzerland and Germany.

How I got here

I trained as a forester. Before writing a line of code I was marking trees, planning interventions in chestnut and hazel stands of southern Italy, and learning from state-qualified foresters how to read a stand. I then met dynamic forest models through the mentorship of Dr. Alessio Collalti at the CNR-ISAFOM Forest Modelling Lab — and with them a way to tackle the question every forester faces but no forester can answer from experience alone: what will this stand do in a climate none of us has seen before?

That is why models matter to me. Silvicultural decisions play out over decades, longer than a forester's career, and increasingly under conditions outside anything we have observed. Models extend field experience beyond the range of past conditions: they make the long-term consequences of an intervention visible, while expert knowledge tests whether those consequences are plausible. Having marked trees in the field and written the code that grows them, I work in the space between the two — translating silvicultural decisions into model rules, and model projections back into choices a practitioner can act on. It means caring equally about the mechanistic detail of how a tree declines and dies, and about the very practical question a forester asks when standing in a stand — who are you, what were you, where are you going?

Rather than committing to a single modelling approach or tool, I am interested in studying and testing the diverse mechanisms that produce forest responses. Models are powerful allies, but neither a dogma nor the absolute truth. They give us a glimpse of what forest ecosystems might experience under "what if" scenarios, and we owe it to the people who use those answers to interpret them with care.

What I work on

Scientific networking

I am an Associate Editor at the Journal of Ecology and a core member of the International Tree Mortality Network, where I bring expertise on dynamic vegetation forest models. I also serve as scientific advisor to the British Ecological Society's Forest Ecology Group, and as communication officer of the Modelling Working Group of SISEF, the Italian Society of Silviculture and Forest Ecology.

Beyond research

I am a mother of a sweet boy and married to a Swiss forester. When there is time left, I craft wooden objects with him at Elvetiholz, paint, argue happily about silviculture, and make music.