Alex Cheesman

Alexander W. Cheesman is a Senior Research Fellow at James Cook University (Australia) and holds an adjunct position at the University of Exeter (UK). He is a plant ecophysiologist and soil scientist whose research sits at the interface of plant physiology, forest ecology, climate change, and Earth-system science.

His research examines how plants—and therefore ecosystems—respond to multiple, interacting global change drivers, including rising temperature, atmospheric CO₂, drought, and air pollution. He combines field studies in tropical forests with controlled-environment experiments and process-based modelling to link leaf- and plant-level physiological processes with ecosystem-scale carbon cycling, water use, and productivity.

A central focus of his work is understanding acclimation and vulnerability in tropical trees, and how physiological responses scale to shape forest resilience under future climates. He is a lead researcher in TropOz, an international initiative investigating the impacts of ground-level ozone pollution on tropical vegetation and the global carbon cycle.

Alexander completed his PhD in Soil and Water Science at the University of Florida in 2010, with fieldwork conducted in remote tropical wetlands in Panama. He subsequently worked at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, supported by the Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory and the Center for Tropical Forest Science (now ForestGEO), where he researched the effects of increasing temperature on tropical tree physiology.

He joined James Cook University in 2013 and has since developed an internationally recognized research programme in tropical plant ecophysiology and global change biology. He is a National Geographic Explorer and his research has been published in journals including Nature Geoscience, Science, Nature, New Phytologist, and Global Change Biology.