Viacheslav Vasenev is associate professor at the Department of Landscape Design and Sustainable Ecosystems and coordinator of the Smart Urban Nature research center in RUDN University. The main research directions include ecosystem services provided by urban soils and green infrastructures as a core to support sustainable urban development. Elvira Dovletyarova is the Director of Agrarian Technological Institute RUDN University of Russia and an Associate Professor at the Department of Landscape Design and Sustainable Ecosystems. Dr. Dovletyarova is Vice-President of the Association of Landscape Architects of Russia and a Member of the Soil Science Society, named after V. V. Dokuchaev. Riccardo Valentini is a full professor of Forest Ecology at the University of Tuscia, Italy. As a member of the IPCC board, he was awarded the joint Nobel Prize for Peace. He is also involved through IPCC and governmental bodies in developing policiesfor the global carbon cycle and the role of land use changes and forestry. He is coordinator of several EU projects aiming to understand and quantify the terrestrial carbon budget and greenhouse gases emissions. His expertise concerns the role of land use changes and forestry in the carbon cycle, biodiversity and bioenergy. Zhongqi Cheng is a professor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, director of the Environmental Sciences Analytical Center at Brooklyn College, and a faculty member for the Earth and Environmental Sciences Ph.D. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Macaulay Honors College. Dr. Cheng is co-founder of the NYC Urban Soils Institute, member of the Healthy Soils Heathy Communities Project, CALs in NYC, the Legacy Lead Coalition, research committee for WRF Biosolids Research, and Board of Trustees for the Mid Atlantic Biosolids Association. Carlo Calfapietra is Director of the Institute of Researchon Terrestrial Ecosystems (IRET), National Research Council (CNR). Member of Czechglobe, Centre of Excellence for Studies on Climate Change of AVCR, Brno (Czech Republic). Expert of European Commission for Nature-Based Solutions. Fields of interest: Green infrastructure, urban forests, urban resilience and sustainability, plant ecophysiology in relation to stress, adaptation-mitigation to global change, air pollution, Carbon and GHG fluxes, VOC, forest plantations, forest fires and extreme environments. Luis Inostroza is a researcher in the Geography institute of Ruhr University of Bochum. His studies integrate spatially explicit quantitative analysis, remote sensing and GIS to investigate the metabolism of socio-ecological systems and its links to ecological and economic functions, from local to global scales. Luis Inostroza is and editor of the journals Change and Adaptation in Social-ecological Systems (CASES) and Ecosystem services. Michael Leuchner is a professor of Physical Geography and Climatology in RWTH University of Aachen. The research interests include atmospheric environmental research, energy and matter fluxes of terrestrial surfaces and the atmosphere, ecological climatology and ecohydrology.
