Michał Słowiński is a researcher at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IGiPZ PAN). His research focuses on reconstructing long-term environmental change from natural archives, particularly peatlands and lake sediments. He applies multi-proxy palaeoecological and geochemical approaches such as plant macrofossils, pollen and non-pollen palynomorphs, charcoal, chironomids, testate amoebae, and sediment physical properties supported by radiocarbon chronologies, to quantify past climate variability, hydrological change, carbon accumulation, and disturbance regimes. A central theme of his work is disentangling climate-driven signals from human impacts (e.g., land-use change, forest exploitation, and fire history) to understand how coupled socio-ecological systems evolved through the Holocene.

His current research also uses palaeoecological proxies to examine lead–lag relationships in ecosystem responses to abrupt climate shifts during the last glacial cycle. Combining ecological and palaeoecological perspectives, he investigates how extreme events affect lake and wetland functioning, aiming to identify resistance, thresholds, and early-warning indicators of change. This includes assessing how climate change, human activities, and extremes such as droughts, floods, and windstorms have shaped ecosystems in the past and are influencing them today. He also works to translate palaeoenvironmental reconstructions into actionable evidence for landscape management and conservation, including the use of remote-sensing data to contextualize field observations and map sensitive features in forested landscapes.

Within the EUROpest project, Prof. Słowiński contributes expertise on long-term ecosystem baselines and disturbance histories relevant to pest outbreaks, human pressures, and ecosystem resilience. He supports the project by extending observational records with sediment-archive evidence, advising on sampling design and proxy selection to identify key stressors and threshold behaviour, and integrating palaeoecological data with contemporary ecological and spatial analyses to inform risk assessment and adaptive management.