Abstract:
Global biodiversity losses continue despite increases in the scale and intensity of management practices designed to halt them. This suggests that the nature, structure and scale of these mitigation measures are insufficient to counteract existing drivers of decline and are likely to be wholly inadequate in offsetting the detrimental effects of either further increases in existing pressures or the emergence of novel drivers. The principal challenge now is to understand why drivers of biodiversity loss are not being addressed and to use this understanding to improve the targeted delivery of appropriate and sufficient conservation management. Using examples from both agricultural and forest systems, Simon will present a range of niche-based approaches linking land-use, resource availability and population dynamics which his team has developed to address this challenge and discuss the adaptation of these approaches for identifying indicator species and monitoring priorities that would ensure better ecological coverage.
About the speaker:
Simon is currently a Natural Environment Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Sustainable Agriculture in the School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia. After completing his PhD in the Edward Grey Institute for Field Ornithology, University of Oxford, Simon worked as a research biologist for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) before spending five years at the Centre of Agri-Environmental Studies, University of Reading. His research is designed to develop and enhance the evidence-base explaining continued global biodiversity losses, particularly in agro-ecosystems, and support the targeted delivery of conservation management measures designed to halt them.