Prof. Franco Biondi is an environmental scientist with a specialty in dendroecology. His main interests are climate and forest dynamics, ecohydrological changes, wildfire and drought history, particularly in mountain watersheds. He holds an Italian doctorate in forestry from the Università di Firenze, and MS and PhD degrees in watershed management and geosciences from the University of Arizona in Tucson. He is currently Professor and DendroLab Director in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he is also a member of four interdisciplinary graduate programs: Environmental Sciences; Hydrologic Sciences; Atmospheric Sciences; and Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology. Together with his students and colleagues, he has conducted research in tree-dominated landscapes of the North American West, Mexico, and southern Europe on how climate (especially drought) impacts wood formation and tree-ring chronologies. He has been funded by the National Science Foundation for about 25 years (including a CAREER award in 2002-2008 and an EAGER award in 2012-2014), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Geographic Society. He has contributed to more than 200 publications and conference presentations, including papers published in Science and Nature. Eleven of his articles have been cited more than 100 times in ISI‐listed scientific journals, and one article has been cited more than 1000 times according to Google Scholar. Since 2010 he has served as Subject Matter Editor for Ecosphere, the open‐access journal published by the Ecological Society of America; currently he is also Specialty Chief Editor for the Paleoecology section of Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. His US awards are from the Association of American Geographers (2001 Paper of the Year), Stanford University (2007), the Fulbright Senior Specialist program (2011), CIRES at the University of Colorado-Boulder (2013), and Harvard University (2014). In 2006 he served on a US National Academy of Science Committee, and he has been a member of NSF review panels in 2006, '09, '12, '16, '17, and '18. His work has also been recognized by awards from international research centers and universities in Switzerland, Italy, France, and Germany.