I have worked on the causes of change in European and Canadian forests, including climate change, insect outbreaks and human disturbances. Tools that I apply to understand forests include Species Distribution Models, demographic models, forest landscape models, and metapopulation/ metacommunity models. A related interest is how species interactions can affect dynamics, and I have studied how food webs could explain Pleistocene mammal extinctions, and developed new mechanisms for how hyperparasitoids could alter parasitoid densities and thus contribute to large-scale insect outbreaks.
In my previous postdoc at SLU Artdatabanken, I studied wood-decay fungi, and developed a metacommunity model where species influence the colonization and extinction of other species in the community (through competition, facilitation).
Combining observational and experimental data to estimate environmental and species drivers of fungal metacommunity dynamics. Nenzén, H, Moor, H, O’Hara, R, Jönsson, M, Nordén, J, Ottosson, E, Snäll, T. 2025.Ecology, 106: e70014
Underprediction of extirpation and colonisation following climate and land-use change using species distribution models. Auffret, A, Nenzén, H, Polaina, E. 2024. Diversity and Distributions, e13834
Oil sands restoration with warm‐adapted trees improves outcomes under moderate but not severe warming scenarios. 2023. H Nenzén, Y Boulanger, E Campbell, D Price, C Mallon, A Petty, D Stralberg. Ecosphere, 14: e4721
Projected climate change effects on Alberta’s boreal forests imply future challenges for oil sands reclamation. 2020. H Nenzén, D Price, D Cyr, Y Boulanger, A Taylor, E Campbell. Restoration Ecology, 28: 39-50
Climate-change refugia in boreal North America: what, where, and for how long? 2020. D Stralberg et al. (22 of 31 authors). Climate Refugia special issue, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 18: 261-270
Can hyperparasitoids cause large‐scale outbreaks of insect herbivores? 2018. H Nenzén, V Martel, D Gravel. Oikos, 127: 1344–1354
Epidemiological landscape models reproduce cyclic insect outbreaks. 2017. H Nenzén, E Filotas, P Peres-Neto, D Gravel. Ecological complexity, 31: 78-87
Signatures of the collapse and incipient recovery of an overexploited marine ecosystem. 2017. EJ, Pedersen, PL, Thompson, RA Ball, M-J Fortin, TC Gouhier, H Link, C Moritz, H Nenzén, RRE Stanley, ZE Taranu, A Gonzalez, F Guichard, P Pepin. Royal Society Open Science, 4: 170215
More than Moran: Coupling statistical and simulation models to understand how dispersal and climate variation drive insect outbreak dynamics. 2017. Nenzén, H, P Peres-Neto, D Gravel. IUFRO special issue in Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 48: 255-264
The impact of 850,000 years of climate changes on the structure and dynamics of mammal food webs. 2014. H Nenzén, D Montoya, S Varela. PlosOne, 9: e106651
demoniche – an R-package for simulating spatially-explicit population dynamics. 2012. H Nenzén, R Swab, DA Keith, MB Araújo. Ecography, 35: 577-580
Choice of threshold alters projections of species range shifts under climate change. 2011. H Nenzén, MB Araújo. Ecological Modelling, 222: 3346-3354