Paul Gordon Jarvis

Education Jarvis was educated at Oriel College, Oxford graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Botany in 1957. Funded by a NATO scholarship, he moved to Uppsala University where he was awarded a second doctorate in plant physiology in 1963.

Career and research In 1964 he moved to Australia, where he did postdoctoral research at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). He returned to the United Kingdom in 1966, where he worked at the University of Aberdeen for nine years until 1975, and then at the University of Edinburgh for twenty six years where he was a Professor until his retirement in 2001.

Jarvis research interests were in plant ecology and plant physiology. He demonstrated the link between forests and the atmosphere using novel techniques for measuring leaf water potential and stomatal conductance. He is the author, co-author or editor of several textbooks and monographs including The carbon balance of forest biomes with Howard Griffiths.

Awards and honours Jarvis was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1997. His certificate of election reads: centered Professor Jarvis has made a unique contribution to plant ecology by elucidating the dependence of transpiration and photosynthesis on physiological and environmental factors over a wide range of scales from cellular to regional. He was one of the first to develop rigorous schemes for the movement and storage of water in plants and for the resistances and potential gradients that determine the diffusion of water vapour and carbon dioxide within leaves. He developed a formula expressing the dependence of stomatal conductance on weather and soil factors that has been widely used by other workers. He was a pioneer in measuring photosynthesis and respiration in a forest stand and in estimating CO₂ fluxes as a function of light transmission and interception. Currently, he is a prominent leader of internationally-planned research on biological aspects of climate change, in particular, the impact of raised levels of CO₂ on forest photosynthesis, on carbon accumulation in forests, and on feedback between vegetation and the atmosphere. He served on the editorial board of Photosynthetica, was the President of the Society for Experimental Biology from 1993 to 1995 and a Commissioner of the Countryside Commission for Scotland. He was also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1979, the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry, the Institute of Chartered Foresters and the Institute of Biology.

Personal life Jarvis met his wife Margaret while they were both undergraduates at Oxford, they had three children.