Dr. Cecilia Chavana-Bryant is a member of staff at the UCL geography department funded by the NERC National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO). She is a scientist trained as a forest ecologist at the University of Oxford (DPhil) and Plymouth University (BSc Hons, MSc) and has over 15 years of field experience: working and climbing trees in tropical and temperate forest canopies, managing international teams, leading and collaborating in scientific publications and training students. Dr. Chavana-Bryant combines years of experience and expertise in forest ecology, vegetation physiochemical and spectral analysis, and terrestrial lidar scanning (TLS) techniques to provide a unique multidisciplinary approach to her research. Her expertise in forest structure and function has been built by long-term in-situ studies conducted in forests across the globe. Her current research involves the collection of TLS data to support the validation/calibration of new biomass space missions such as the ESA Biomass 2024 mission and using TLS data to better understand the environmental and competitive constraints that determine tree form and function and their impacts on forest structure, biomass, and dynamics.