What would a global policy to regulate human use of fixed nitrogen look like?

David Fowler’s research interests are mainly in the biogeochemistry of nitrogen, sulphur and carbon and specifically on surface-atmosphere exchange processes. These interests include some of the major regional environmental issues including photochemical oxidants, eutrophication, acid deposition, emissions of greenhouse gases and atmospheric aerosols. His published work includes 210 refereed publications and a similar output of other papers, reports and books. He has an Honorary Professorship at the University of Nottingham, became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1999, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2002, and in 2005 was awarded a CBE for services in Atmospheric Pollution research. 

Markus Amann is the Director of the ‘Air Quality and Greenhouse Gases’ programme at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria. He is coordinating the policy analyses on cost-effective emission control strategies for the clean air and climate policy proposals of the European Commission and the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution. He received his PhD in economics from Karlsruhe University, Germany, and has been appointed to the Scientific Advisory Panel of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) and the Climate and Clean Air Commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Since 1992 Maren Voss has been affiliated to the Leibniz Institute of Baltic Sea Research, Warnemünde, where she leads a working group which focuses on a better understanding of the marine nitrogen cycle and the anthropogenic perturbation. Her group specifically study sources and sinks of reactive nitrogen in water and sediments. Therefore they have strong collaborations with terrestrial, fresh water and agriculture research groups. Quality objectives for the Wadden Sea were in her focus of work when she worked at the National Park Bureau of the Wadden Sea in 1992. Before that she graduated at Kiel University in 1988 where she also received her PhD in 1990 with a thesis entitled “Stable isotopes in suspended and sedimenting particles in the Northern North Atlantic”. In 1989 and 1990 she spent six month at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the USA to learn and establish nitrogen stable isotope work in marine sciences in Germany. 

Paul Monks was born in St Helens in the UK. He received his BSc degree from the University of Warwick and his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1991. In 1992 he took up NAS/NRC fellowship in Astrochemistry at NASA/Goddard before returning in 1994 to the UK to work a post-doctoral position at the School of Environmental Sciences at UEA. In 1996 he was appointed to a lectureship in Earth Observation Science in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Leicester, being promoted to a Readership in Atmospheric Chemistry in 2003 and a Professorship in 2007. He is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2004, he was awarded the EU Lillehamer Young Scientist award.

His primary research interests are the scientific questions underlying the role of photochemistry in the control of atmospheric composition; chemistry and transport, particularly the impact of long-range transport on chemical composition; the feedbacks between climate and atmospheric chemistry; organic complexity and the control of regional pollution and the measurement of the chemical composition of the troposphere from space.  He is the current co-chair of the IGBP-International Global Atmospheric Chemistry program and chair of the DEFRA Air Quality expert group as well as being a member of the UK Space Agency, Space Leadership Council and Natural Environment Research Council lead body (council).

Dr Kevin Hicks is a Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), Environment Department, University of York, UK. His research interests focus on the transfer of scientific information to the policy process and cover air pollution impacts on terrestrial ecosystems from local to global scales, ecosystem service approaches to environmental management, the potential for integrated policies on air pollution and climate change and air pollution issues in developing countries. He has organized international workshops on nitrogen deposition impacts to ecosystems and attended UNECE scientific and other national/international meetings on air pollution issues, as well as being involved in the European Nitrogen Assessment and the UNEP/WMO Integrated Assessment of Black Carbon and Tropospheric Ozone. He has also worked on projects for the UK government and conservation agencies related to nitrogen impacts on terrestrial ecosystems and the development of the ecosystem service approach. He is a co-founder and part of the secretariat of the Global Atmospheric Pollution Forum. 

Klaus Butterbach-Bahl is Head of Department “Bio-Geo-Chemical Processes” at the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, Atmospheric Environmental Research (IMK-IFU), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and Professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and Guest Research Professor at the Institute for Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. His main research interests are related to measurements and modeling of biosphere-hydrosphere-atmosphere exchange processes of environmental important trace compounds at site and regional scales with a specific focus on nitrogen compounds. 

James N Galloway is the Sidman P Poole Professor of Environmental Sciences, and the Associate Dean for the Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, at the University of Virginia.  Dr Galloway received the BA degree in Chemistry and Biology from Whittier College in 1966.  In 1972 he received his PhD degree in Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego.  Following two years as a professional potter in Lexington, Virginia, he accepted a postdoctoral appointment with Gene Likens at Cornell University.  In 1976, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and from 1996 to 2001 served as chair of the department. He serves on the Boards of Trustees of the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole MA, and the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences.  From 1988 to 1995, he served as President of the BIOS Board. He was the founding chair of the International Nitrogen Initiative from 2003 to 2008, and was a member of the USA EPA Science Advisory Board from 2003 to 2009. He is currently a lead author in Working Group 1, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In 2002 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and was awarded, with Harold Mooney, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. In 2010 he was elected to the Raven Society, the oldest honor society at the University of Virginia.  Most recently, Whittier College awarded him the Alumnus Achievement Award for 2011.

His research on biogeochemistry includes the natural and anthropogenic controls on chemical cycles at the watershed, regional and global scales.  His current research focuses on beneficial and detrimental effects of reactive nitrogen as it cascades between the atmosphere, terrestrial ecosystems and freshwater and marine ecosystems.