Daniela Kleinschmit

Daniela Kleinschmit has been active in IUFRO since 2000. She started as Deputy Coordinator of the IUFRO Task Force on "Public Relations in Forest Sciences" and in the following term coordinated the Task Force on “Communicating Forest Sciences”. From 2011 to 2014 Daniela was active as Deputy Coordinator of the Task Force on International Forest Governance. From 2010 to 2019 she was Coordinator of Division 9 - Forest Policy and Economics. She was involved in IUFRO's Global Forest Expert Panel (GFEP) on International Forest Regimes and on Food Security and Nutrition. She was the scientific coordinator of a GFEP on Illegal Logging and Timber Trade. From 2019-2024, Daniela was IUFRO Vice-President for Divisions. She now holds the position of IUFRO President, the first female President in the history of IUFRO.

Daniela is Professor and head of the chair for Forest and Environmental Policy at the University of Freiburg, Germany.  There, she has also been Vice-Dean and Dean of the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources. Before working in Freiburg in 2014 she spent six years at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, first as Assistant Professor and afterwards as Associate Professor for Forest  Policy.

She has research projects on national, EU and international levels and published a number of peer reviewed articles, book chapters, edited volumes and conference papers on a variety of forest and agricultural policy topics. Her research interests comprise land use policies with a focus on forest as well as agricultural policy, bioeconomy, international forest governance, policy integration and communication. She has successfully integrated her scientific knowledge in diverse science-policy interactions at different political levels. 

One major reason to become an active member of IUFRO is her belief in networked sciences being more as the sum of their parts. Therefore, she has also initiated the Nordic Network on Forest Policy Sciences.