Biography
Ricardo Villalba is a Senior Researcher at CONICET, based at the Argentinean Institute of Snow, Ice and Environmental Sciences (IANIGLA) in Mendoza, Argentina. His work investigates how climate variability and extremes shape mountain forests and water resources in the southern Andes, with a focus on the impacts of rapid warming and drying on forest growth, drought stress, and resilience. Using multi-century tree-ring networks together with ecohydrological analyses and high-resolution stem growth monitoring (dendrometers), he has shown that key 20th-century Andean climate anomalies were unprecedented over the last ~500 years or more, and has documented associated ecosystem disruptions, including forest dieback and episodic tree mortality. He leads RED BOSQUE-CLIMA, a national Forest–Climate Network uniting multiple institutions and 100 researchers, integrating permanent plots and dendrometers to track native forest dynamics and improve 21st-century projections of tree growth and vulnerability.
