Professor Dr Wolfgang Cramer, environmental geographer and global ecologist, is research director (CNRS) at the Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE), in Aix-en-Provence (France).

Wolfgang Cramer received his academic training at the Universities of Gießen/Germany (geography, diploma 1981) and Uppsala/Sweden (plant ecology, Ph.D. 1986). From 1987 to 1993, he taught and conducted his research at the Department of Geography, Trondheim University (Norway) while also being a frequently visiting scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria). In 1992, he joined the newly founded Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Potsdam, Germany, as head of the department “Global Change and Natural Systems”, later to become the institute’s research domain “Earth System Analysis”. In 2003, he was appointed full professor of global ecology at Potsdam University. In 2011, he left Potsdam for the Mediterranean Institute for Ecology and Paleoecology (IMEP), in order to help its transition to IMBE. 2017, he was elected associated member of the Académie d’Agriculture de France.

The scientific contributions by Cramer’s research group (150+ papers) were initially in the area of modelling forest dynamics under climate change. He then began to seek a broader understanding of biosphere dynamics at the global and continental scale, including aspects of natural and human disturbance as well as biodiversity. He has been directing a large European ecosystem modelling project, ATEAM (EU FP5), as well as its companion outreach activity, AVEC. Together, these projects have resulted in the first region-specific and comprehensive ecosystem service assessment across Europe. Based on ATEAM/AVEC, he has established popular, two-weeks long annual summer schools for young experts in the field of biodiversity and ecosystem services (now run by the EU Network of Excellence ALTER-Net).

For international scientific cooperation, Wolfgang Cramer has contributed in various roles to the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), DIVERSITAS and their successor Future Earth. He has co-chaired the Science Committee of ecoSERVICES from 2014-2018 and is a PECS Fellow.

Since 1992, Wolfgang Cramer is a contributor in many roles to the IPCC (Peace Nobel Prize 2007, Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity 2022), currently working as Lead Author for the Sixth Assessment Report. With Joël Guiot, he coordinates the Mediterranean Experts on Climate and Environmental Change, (MedECC, North-South Prize 2020). He is (with James Ford, University of Leeds, UK) co-chief editor of the Springer Nature journal Regional Environmental Change. With Hervé Le Treut (Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, Paris, France), he co-chairs the French National Committee for Global Change Research.