Cyrille Rathgeber completed his Ph.D. in population biology and ecology in 2002. He is currently working as a researcher at INRAE in Nancy. Cyrille's research interests cover the fields of dendroecology and vegetation modelling. He is particularly involved in understanding the relationships between tree-ring formation and environmental factors in the context of global changes in order to assess past-climate variability, detect on-going changes, and assess future impacts on forests. More generally, he is also interested in ecology, environmental history, and science philosophy. Trained as an ecologist, he did his PhD in dendroecology at the Mediterranean Institute for Ecology and Palaeoecology in Marseilles (France). The PhD concerned the impact of atmospheric CO2 concentration increase and climatic changes on Aleppo pine forest productivity in south-east France. After his Ph.D. thesis, he was awarded with a European Marie Curie Fellowship to join the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, U.K) and to carry out a scientific project in which he used vegetation model to compare climate model experiments and tree-ring data in Europe. Since 2005, Cyrille is working at INRAE Grand Est – Nancy, on the impact of climatic changes on wood formation. This involve detecting the evolution of forest productivity during the industrial period with a careful attention on the relationship between wood density and anatomy in order to link observed trends with modifications of tree functioning; as well as understanding the influence of environmental factors on cambial activity and wood formation using data from instrumented stand. Cyrille developed innovative methods for dealing with wood formation monitoring data.