Nicole Forstenhäusler

Nicole Forstenhäusler

Profile

I grew up in Germany where I completed a degree in Bioinformatics at the University of Tübingen. My thesis focused on pattern search within biological networks where I implemented an algorithm to search for similar biochemical pathways within different species. After a few years working in IT and industries, I moved to the UK where I completed an MSc in Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. In my dissertation, I used species distribution models to investigate the selection of conservation areas resilient to climate change for birds in Britain. Following my studies, I became a research associate at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the UEA and my research focused on the impacts of climate change on agriculture and biodiversity. Among others, I contributed to the HELIX (high-end climate impacts and extremes) and the EUCalc (European Calculator) project. 

Nicole Forstenhäusler

Geosciences, Resources and Environmental Risk

University of East Anglia, School of Environmental Sciences

PhD title: Global fluvial flooding risks under climate change using a global regionalised hydrological model

Every year, floods cause significant social, economic and environmental damage and there is an increasing need for risk assessments of extreme hydro-meteorological hazards as well as sustainable water resources management. To date, only a handful of global hydrological models to simulate long-term water balance, forecast streamflow and assess impacts of environmental changes on flood risks have been developed. Often, these models suffer from a lack of regionalised model parameters and their streamflow simulations can thus be unreliable.

The aim of my project is to develop a regionalised global hydrological model to assess impacts of climate change on flood risks. The focus is on the development of a regionalised model parameterisation method to improve model performance in some parts of the world. I will then use the improved model to model global flood hazards under climate change using the most recent climate reanalysis and global climate model outputs.

This PhD project is jointly funded by the Faculty of Science of UEA and The Amar-Franses and Foster-Jenkins Trust.

Publications

    Warren, R., Price, J., Graham, E., Forstenhaeusler, N. and Vanderwal, J. (2018) The projected effect on insects, vertebrates, and plants of limiting global warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C. Science, 360 (6390). pp. 791-795.

    Warren, R., Alfieri, L., Burke, S., Feyen, L., Forstenhaeusler, N., Koutroulis, A., Nikoloulopoulos, A., Papadimitriou, L., Price, J., South, A., Tsanis, A. & Wallace, C. (2017). Report on different degrees of adaptation measures applied in the impact models (No. Deliverable 4.4, High End Climate Impacts and Extremes (HELIX), Project 603864). European Commission 7th Framework Programme.

Awards and Prizes

Hubert H. Lamb Memorial Prize for the best dissertation on Climate Change in 2016

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0474-7959