Simon Lewis is Professor of Global Change Science at the University of Leeds and University College London. Prior to this he was a Royal Society University Research Fellow for nine years. A plant ecologist by training, he focuses on changes to the Earth system with a central focus on the tropics. He founded and co-manage the African Tropical Rainforest Observatory, AfriTRON (www.afritron.org), a network of long-term tropical forest inventory sites across 13 countries in Africa, and co-manages the long-term forest inventory data repository and data management tool forestplots.net. With Greta Dargie, Suspense Ifo, Yannick Bocko and others he first quantified the extent of the Central Congo peatlands and made the first estimate of the peatlnds’ carbon stocks that included on the ground observations.