Rate My Professor Jarno Vanhatalo

Jarno Vanhatalo is Professor of Statistics at the University of Helsinki, with appointments in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the Kumpula campus, Faculty of Science, and the Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology at the Viikki campus, Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences. He holds a D.Sc. (Tech) degree. His research centers on developing advanced Bayesian statistical models and computational methods for ecological and environmental applications, including species distribution modeling, spatiotemporal community dynamics, trait-based ecological selection, population modeling, and ecosystem responses to climate change and human impacts. Vanhatalo leads the Environmental and Ecological Statistics research group and is a principal investigator at the Research Centre for Ecological Change. He has obtained significant funding from prestigious sources, such as the European Research Council Consolidator Grant for the BEFPREDICT project (2024–2029), which aims to provide predictive understanding of global change effects on ecological communities and ecosystem functions; Academy of Finland projects including Stat4BioMo (2026–2029) on statistical models for spatiotemporal species dynamics and Luke UH MA on forest biomass data for biodiversity and carbon management; and EU-funded OBSERVING AND MAPPING MARINE ECOSYSTEMS (2022–2026).

Vanhatalo's scholarly output includes over 70 peer-reviewed articles, with recent high-impact publications such as “Thermal homogenization of boreal communities in response to climate warming” (PNAS, 2025), “Recent community warming of moths in Finland is driven by extinction in the north and colonisation in the south” (Nature Communications, 2025), “Strong context dependence in the relative importance of climate and habitat on nation-wide macro-moth community changes” (Journal of Animal Ecology, 2025), “Model-based variance partitioning for statistical ecology” (Ecological Monographs, 2025), “Integrated population model reveals human- and environment-driven changes in Baltic ringed seal Pusa hispida botnica demography and behavior” (Marine Ecology Progress Series, 2025), and “Inferring ecological selection from multidimensional community trait distributions along environmental gradients” (Ecology, 2024). His work garners over 3,800 citations on Google Scholar. He supervises doctoral programmes in Mathematics and Statistics and in Wildlife Biology Research, contributes as a reviewer for Conservation Biology, and has delivered invited talks including at Nokia AI Friday (2019) and HiData and HiLIFE events (2020). Vanhatalo was promoted to full professor in 2024.