User:Timeousbeastie/Gregor Aas

Gregor Aas (born 29 January 1957, Bamberg) is a German forestry scientist. He specialises in dendrology, on which he has published numerous works. He is the director of the Ecological-Botanical Garden of the University of Baereuth.

Life
Gregor Aas grew up and attended school in Bamberg. He studied forestry at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and ETH Zürich from 1978 to 1982. Between 1984 and 1990, he worked at LMU as a Wissenschaftlicher Assistent, before sucessfully defending his doctoral thesis, Untersuchungen zur Trennung und Kreuzbarkeit von Stiel- und Traubeneiche (Quercus robur L. und Q[uercus] petraea [Matt.] Liebl.) in 1990. He was awarded the Thurn-und-Taxis Förderpreis für die Forstwissenschaft for his doctoral thesis in 1990, which is a prize awarded annually to early career academics whose work has significantly advanced forestry science.

In the following six years, Gregor Aas worked as a research fellow for the Professor of Forest Pathology and Dendrology in the Department for Forestry and Wood Sciences of ETH Zürich. In 1996, he completed his habilitation in the field of dendrology at ETH Zurich with his research thesis, ''Morphologische und ökologische Variation mitteleuropäischer Quercus-Arten. Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis der Biodiversität''. As well as oak species, Aas has intensively researched willows and sorbus, as well as abies alba conifers. In addition, he conducts research into the extent to which non-native tree species can used to create climate-adaptive forests, that can better cope with the assumed consequences of global warming in Germany. Aas became director of the Ecological-Botanical Garden of the University of Bayreuth in October 1996. As part of this role, he is also a member of the Bayreuth Centre of Ecology and Environmental Research (BayCEER). Aas has been Privatdozent for Botany at the University of Bayreuth and of Dendrology at ETH Zürich since 1998.

A broader public in Germany know Aas through his field guides Bäume (1987) und Laubbäume (1992), published in several editions and translated into English as Trees of Britain and Europe, as well as Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Spanish, French and Slovakian.

In addition, Aas regularly publishes articles in the fields of forestry, dendrology, botany and horticulture. Numerous contributions have been published in the series Berichte aus der Bayerischen Landesanstalt für Wald und Forstwirtschaft, reports from the Bavarian State Institute for Forests and Forestry.

Gregor Aas was also a basketballer, playing for FC Bamberg in the 1970's. In the 1980's he was a trainer for FC Bayern Munich, and then for many years at Medi Bayreuth.

Since 2014, Gregor Aas has been a deputy member of the Nature Conservation Advisory Board of the Government of Upper Franconia.



Gregor Aas founded the Enzyklopädie der Holzgewächse (Encyclopaedia of woody plants) in 1994 together with Peter Schütt, Hans Joachim Schuck and Ulla Lang and was one of the editors and authors of this specialist encyclopedia (as of 2015). He was also one of the editors of the book Lexikon der Forstbotanik. Morphologie, Pathologie, Ökologie und Systematik wichtiger Baum- und Straucharten (Lexicon of forest botany. Morphology, pathology, ecology and systematics of important tree and shrub species) He is also co-author of the Enzyklopädie der Gartengehölze (Encyclopaedia of garden trees) edited by Andreas Bärtels and Peter A. Schmidt.

Weblinks

 * Gregor Aas bio in the website of the Bayreuth Centre for Ecology and Environmental Research