Aimée T. Classen

Aimée Classen is an American ecologist who studies the impact of global changes on a diverse array of terrestrial ecosystems. Her work is notable for its span across ecological scales and concepts, and the diversity of terrestrial ecosystems that it encompasses, including forests, meadows, bogs, and tropics in temperate and boreal climates. Classen is editor-in-chief of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) journal Ecological Monographs.

Career Classen began her first teaching position as an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. In 2015, she became an adjunct associate professor at the university. During this period, she began to hold multiple positions at a time. From 2014 to 2018, she served as an associated professor at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. During that same time, she became a faculty member in the Center of Macroecology at the University of Copenhagen in 2014 and an adjunct professor at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand in 2016, positions which she continues to hold today. Finally, from 2018 to 2020, Classen served four simultaneous roles at the University of Vermont: professor for the Rubenstein School at the University of Vermont, director for the George D. Aiken Forestry Sciences Laboratory, fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment, and adjunct professor for the Department of Biology.

By monitoring 60 different sites in the Tibetan Plateau she has been able to study biodiversity in alpine grassland under varying climate conditions involving temperature, rainfall, and soil acidity. This is enabling scientists to better understand ecosystems in terms of multiple functions which they provide, how those functions are controlled and how they may be effected by climate change.

Classen was a principal investigator (PI) for WaRM, a project measuring the impact of direct and indirect effects of warming on mountain landscapes in 10 nations and 5 continents.

In 2020, Classen and Appala Raju Badireddy received a Gund Institute Catalyst Award to develop low-cost, flexible sensors to better study biogeochemical responses such as changes in soil nutrients like nitrogen in extreme environments.

As part of an interdisciplinary partnership between The Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis, the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Saint Louis Zoo, Classen has helped to model the impact of herbivore parasites on the broader ecosystems of which they are a part. Researchers found that non-lethal parasites reduced the feeding rates of caribou, reindeer, and other herbivores, which in turn decreased their impact on plants and lichens and available biomass. The research is an example of how frequently overlooked factors in an ecosystem can have significant ecological consequences.

In 2020, Classen was recognized by the Ecological Society of America (ESA) for: “creative leadership and vision for international research collaborations using mountain ecosystems as models for climate change research… and for stellar research contributions to the ecology of global environmental change, including how soil microbial diversity shapes ecosystems, and environmental controls on soil nutrient cycling and carbon storage.” 2020. Gund Institute Catalyst Award 2023. Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science