The Harvard Forest community and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences are delighted to welcome Dr. Jonathan Thompson as the Forest’s eighth Director.
Thompson is a landscape ecologist whose lab studies the impacts of land use on forest processes and services. His lab conducts basic research to understand the impacts of forest fragmentation on forest carbon cycling and the ways that forest ecosystems respond to natural and human disturbance. He also conducts applied research to understand how alternative policy and management choices can help society achieve goals for mitigating climate change and conserve biodiversity. He was the lead author of the Land Sector and Forest Carbon studies for the Massachusetts Decarbonization roadmap and recently partnered with Mass Audubon on an analysis showing how the state can meet its alternative energy goals without clearing forests for utility scale solar.
Thompson first came to Harvard Forest in 2008 as a post-doctoral fellow working with then-Director David Foster. Following a five-year position at the Smithsonian, he returned to Harvard Forest full-time as a Senior Ecologist. From 2019 to 2025 he served as lead principal investigator for Harvard Forest’s NSF-funded LTER program. In 2020 he was promoted to HF Research Director.
Thompson’s goals as Director stem from deep knowledge gained through many years of connection with the Forest. “The Harvard Forest is a special place,” Thompson says, “where researchers and students are working together to make discoveries about the natural word. We are Harvard University’s outdoor classroom and laboratory. My goals are to increase the use of the Forest for experiential learning and for faculty research.”
