Gerard Rocher Ros

River networks have more in common with the veins or the lungs than with a lake or a forest, and that’s how I like to think about my favourite ecosystem. I am interested in how rivers process organic matter from a systems perspective, in order to understand how our northern landscapes are responding to climate change.

Gerard grew up in a small town in the Spanish Pyrenees, where mountains were his backyard. That much time in nature draw him to study Environmental Science in Barcelona University (Spain). Instead of going to a classic Erasmus exchange in a city in Europe, Gerard went to spend half a year in the Abisko Research Station in northern Sweden, where he got hooked up to the Arctic. After finishing his undergraduate studies, in 2013 he started a master in modelling in the Mathematics department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. There, he got a set computational tools to complement the on-site experience in ecology and biogeochemistry.

In 2014, Gerard came back to the north in Umeå University to start a PhD, studying carbon processing in Arctic river networks. He got to spend “vårvinter” and summer in Abisko for fieldwork, but also for climbing, ski-touring and mountain running. After graduating in 2019, he stayed in Umeå for a postdoc exploring how herbivores propagate signals across terrestrial-aquatic ecosystem boundaries, combined with parental leave and COVID. Then in 2022 he went with a VR mobility grant to do a postdoc in the Centre of Advanced studies in Blanes (Spain), developing models of carbon processing in river networks.

Many things happened in 2024, as Gerard got a scholarship from the King Carl XVI Gustaf Foundation’s 50-year fund for science (king’s handshake included), he was the national winner of the Frontiers planet prize, got a ERC Starting Grant to work on methane cycling in Arctic rivers, and got appointed as Assistant Professor in Ecosystem Ecology in Umeå University, jointly with the department of Ecology and IceLab.