Alessandro Ossola, PhD

Current projects

• Urban heat islands as windows into climate change and ecosystem service provisioning by street trees (funded by USDA NIFA)
• Predicting tree root occlusions of sewerage infrastructure in the Greater Sydney Region (funded by Sydney Water)
• Breathing green life into industrial landscapes (funded by NSW DPIE)
• Global gardening trends during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Understanding the ecological and social traits of residential landscapes (with CSIRO and USFS)
• The Global Urban Tree Inventory: A database of the diverse tree flora that inhabits the world’s cities
• Nature-based solutions for climate adaptation and urban sustainability

Current teaching

• ENH 06 Intro to Environmental Plants (Fall 2022)
• ENH 105 Taxonomy and Ecology of Environmental Plant Families (Spring 2023)

Outreach and Extension

• Dr Ossola’s research was showcased in several media contributions on TV, radio, web, magazines, and press, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, ABC’s News, SBS Radio, Channel 7 News, The Advertiser, The Daily Telegraph, Nature Index, Cosmos Magazine, and The Conversation, among many others.

External activities that contribute to scholarship

• Honorary Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
• Honorary Research Fellow, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
• Grant Reviewer and panelist for NASEM and NOAA, USA; NERC, UK; NSERC, Canada; German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF); Irish Research Council; Dutch Research Council (NOW), among others.
• Associate Editor for Landscape and Urban Planning.
• Review Editor for journals Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, and Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.
• Reviewer for journals Landscape and Urban Planning, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, Environmental Pollution, Journal of Hydrology, Journal of Applied Ecology, Scientific Reports, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Ecology and Society Urban Ecosystems, Biology Letters, Functional Ecology, Journal of Ecology, Science of the Total Environment, Applied Soil Ecology, Environmental Science and Policy, Soil Biology and Biochemistry, PLoS One, Biodiversity and Conservation, Ecosphere, Journal of Arid Environments, Biotropica, Urban Naturalist, Journal of Urban Ecology, Sustainable Cities and Society, AMBIO, among others.

Prizes, Awards, Honors

• US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine – NRC Research Associate Award (2016-2017).