Rate My Professor Julia Kemppinen

Julia Kemppinen serves as Assistant Professor in the Botany and Mycology Unit at the University of Helsinki, where she leads the Biodiversity Change research group. This group investigates the patterns and mechanisms of biodiversity changes, focusing on the impacts of climate change and land use on plant communities in northern ecosystems such as tundra. Integrating methods from ecology and geography, the group conducts fundamental research, generates primary data, and adheres to open science practices in research, teaching, and public outreach activities.

Kemppinen completed her PhD at the University of Helsinki in 2020 with the dissertation "Soil moisture and its importance for tundra plants," demonstrating the strong role of soil moisture in shaping Arctic vegetation. She subsequently held a postdoctoral position at the University of Oulu. As an Academy Research Fellow, her ongoing project explores how microclimates influence tundra plant species distributions and traits under climate change. She supervises students in the Doctoral Programme in Interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences and serves as an editor for the journal Oikos since November 2024. Her research output includes influential publications such as "Global maps of soil temperature" (Global Change Biology, 2021), "Microclimate, an important part of ecology and biogeography" (Global Ecology and Biogeography, 2024), "Fine-scale tundra vegetation patterns are strongly related to winter thermal conditions" (Nature Climate Change, 2020), "Consistent trait–environment relationships within and across tundra plant communities" (Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2021), "Modelling soil moisture in a high-latitude landscape using LiDAR and soil data" (Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 2018), and recent works on microclimatic buffering in boreal forests and geodiversity in ecological connectivity.