Photo of Dr. Jed O. Kaplan

Dr. Jed O. Kaplan

Contact information

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Research partners

I am open to contact from prospective graduate students (M.Sc. and Ph.D.) with an interest in computer simulation modeling of wildfire, vegetation dynamics, and paleoenvironmental change.

Background

Biography

Jed Kaplan studied Earth Sciences and Geography at Dartmouth College, USA and received his Ph.D. in Plant Ecology from Lund University, Sweden. He was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany and the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis in Victoria, BC, Canada. He was a Marie Curie Fellow, hosted by the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy and subsequently held several positions in Switzerland, including professorships at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, University of Geneva, and University of Lausanne supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Research Council. Jed was a senior research fellow in the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, Associate Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Hong Kong, and Senior Scientist in the Institute of Geography, University of Augsburg. He is currently Professor in the Departments of Earth, Energy, and Environment and Computer Science at the University of Calgary, Canada. Jed’s research interests center around the relationships between land cover and climate and how human-environment interactions affect environment and feed back to societies and human health.

Research

Areas of Research

Research overview

Professor Jed O. Kaplan’s research sits at the interface between the earth and environmental sciences and computer science. Through the development and application of computer simulation models of Earth System processes, Dr. Kaplan and his team aim to reveal the ways in which humans and natural cycles interact, evolve, and affect climate and ecosystems over the long-term. His current projects include: 

  • Identifying opportunities for the restoration of Indigenous fire management practices that reduce air pollution and the risk of catastrophic and destructive wildfires.
  • Understanding how climate change influenced human and societal evolution from the Paleolithic to the emergence of complex civilizations.
  • Quantifying how technological innovation in history affected global land cover.
  • Characterizing how land use and land cover change feedback to weather and climate.
  • Development of a next generation of global vegetation models with greater fidelity and higher resolution.

Participation in university strategic initiatives

Courses

Course number Course title Semester
ASHA 222 Ways of Making and Knowing Fall 2024 - Winter 2025

Publications