Willy Tinner

Willy Tinner (born 18 July 1965) is an Italian-Swiss paleoecologist. He is a professor at the University of Bern and head of the Paleoecology Section at its Institute of Plant Sciences. From 2017 to 2022 he was co-chair of PAGES (Past Global Changes), an international research programme on past environmental change. His research uses pollen analysis, macrofossil and charcoal analysis, chironomid analysis, sedimentary ancient DNA, and dynamic vegetation modelling to reconstruct interactions among climate, vegetation, and human activity over timescales of years to millennia. Education and career Tinner was born in Italy and holds Italian and Swiss citizenship. He completed a Master of Science at the University of Bern in 1993, with a major in geography and minors in botany, geology and archaeology, and a doctorate in 1998 on vegetation and fire dynamics in the southern Alps, supervised by Brigitta Ammann and Marco Conedera. He received his habilitation in geobotany and paleoecology at Bern in 2005. A 1999 paper in the Journal of Ecology examined long-term forest fire dynamics in the same region, and a 2003 paper with Hu addressed methodology for reconstructing fire history from microscopic charcoal particles.

A 2001 study in Geology with André F. Lotter used annually laminated sediments to examine Central European vegetation responses to the abrupt climate event around 8,200 years ago, reporting a vegetation response within decades, including a decline of hazel and expansion of beech and fir. He was a co-author on a 2009 PNAS synthesis using charcoal records from 35 North American sites to examine wildfire responses to abrupt climate change over the past 17,000 years. EXPLO project In 2018, Tinner co-initiated the EXPLO project (Exploring the Dynamics and Causes of Prehistoric Land Use Change in the Cradle of European Farming), funded by a European Research Council Synergy Grant of €6.4 million. It was the first ERC Synergy Grant awarded to the University of Bern. The project is a collaboration between the University of Bern, the University of Oxford, and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, combining underwater archaeology, paleoecology, and computer modelling to study early farming communities in Greece and the southern Balkans over the past 10,000 years. Fieldwork has included sediment coring and excavation at prehistoric settlements on Lake Ohrid, Lake Prespa, and lakes in northern Greece, producing chronologies for Neolithic and Bronze Age sites. Alpine biodiversity A 2025 study in Nature Communications co-authored by members of Tinner's research group analysed sedimentary ancient DNA from 14 Alpine lakes covering 603 plant taxa and 11 mammal species over 14,000 years, and reported that wild ungulates and cattle were associated with greater alpine plant diversity in the late Holocene than temperature alone. Editorial and review work Tinner is an associate editor of Vegetation History and Archaeobotany and has reviewed grant proposals for the US National Science Foundation, the Agence nationale de la recherche, and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, among others. His group's research on populations of silver fir (Abies alba) in Tuscany and Ticino has been covered in the WSL magazine Diagonal. A 2026 profile in the Pro Natura magazine described his use of pollen records to reconstruct past plant communities, and his group's work on Bronze Age lakeshore settlements has been reported in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Selected publications