Latest News
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April 2016
PhD awarded David Curnick was awarded his PhD for his thesis: The role of marine protected areas in conserving highly mobile pelagic species. Congratulations David! Cerrado field work Gee Ferreira has travelled to Brazil to undertake his field work evaluating the impact of protected areas on the mammal communities of the Cerrado. Gee will be using camera traps to evaluate evidence of Protected Area impacts. February 2016
Land use impacts on beta diversity New member of the lab, Tim Newbold, has published a paper in the journal Ecography, evaluating turnover of ecological communities in response to land use. Read the paper here. January 2016
David Curnick PhD submitted Understanding how effective large MPAs are in protecting populations of migratory pelagic fish species is a central goal of Conservation Biology. David's thesis addressed this in the Chagos Marine Protected Area. June 2015
Marsh Award Ben was awarded the Zoological Society of London's Marsh Award for Conservation. View the scientific award winners here, and previous winners of the Marsh award here. January 2015
Chagos Expedition David Curnick has gone to the British Indian Ocean Territory to continue his PhD field work in Chagos, as part of the Chagos 2015 Expedition. David will be posting a series of blogs, detailing his attempts to satellite tag pelagic sharks. October 2014
Predictive conservation science for policy Out this week, a Perspective in the journal Science, published with Emily Nicholson. We argue that biodiversity indicators could be better tested, and projected, in order to inform environmental policy more effectively. Read the early view of the paper here, and Em's blog on it here. September 2014
Defaunation in the Anthropocene Our analysis of biodiversity change was published in the journal Science, demonstrating that those invertebrate species that are monitored, have declined steeply in number since 1970: link. Extinction and environmental change Chris has published his PhD 'Extinction and environmental change: testing the predictability of species loss'. Here is the link. August 2014
Predicting the Conservation Status of DD species Lucie's paper on predicting extinction risk of species currently classified as Data Deficient on the IUCN Red List has just been published in the journal Conservation Biology. Here is the link. May 2014
Dr Lucie Bland Lucie passed her PhD viva this month, with no corrections. Lucie will shortly take up a post-doc in Melbourne, Australia–working on the Red List of ecosystems. Congratulations Lucie! March 2014
Chagos Blog Latest blog on David Curnick's PhD research in the Chagos Marine Protected Area. Follow @david_curnick and the #BFChagos14 hastag for more updates Tagging sharks in Chagos David Curnick is travelling to the Chagos Marine Protected Area as part of his fieldwork investigating the efficacy of protected areas in protecting pelagic migrants. David will be fitting satellite tags to a variety of shark species, as well as helping to service an acoustic array. Follow his progress #BFChagos14 on twitter. February 2014
Integrating population dynamics and evolutionary history Ben Collen presented at The Royal Society symposium on Phylogney, Extinction Risks, and Conservation. See the meeting programme and his abstract here. January 2014
Dr Chris Clements A high bar has been set, with Chris passing his PhD viva with no corrections, having published 4 papers and an R package during his PhD. Chris will be taking up a Post doc at the University of Zurich with Arpat Ozgul. Congratulations Chris! November 2013
The more parasites the better? Chris Clements has co-authored a response in Science about the likely impacts of climate change on parasite ecology. Monitoring in marine protected areas David Curnick has been presenting at the IMPAC conference, and travelling to Geneva for a workshop on monitoring megafuana in the Chagos MPA. Read about his travels here. October 2013
New paper accepted Chris Clements has had a new paper accepted in Ecology & Evolution. The paper is: Interactions between assembly order and environmental change can alter both short and long-term community composition. We'll post the link as soon as we have it. Satellite tags for ocean shark tracking David Curnick along with the Chagos Conservation Trust has been awarded a Rufford small grant to fund satellite tags for his project field work in Chagos. David will be tagging a variety of shark species to evaluate their use of the Marine Protected Area. September 2013
European wildlife resurgence What can we learn from successful conservation? This report evaluates what attributes a set of species which have undergone recent resurgence in numbers and/or range possess. Read about the project with ZSL, BirdLife and Rewilding Europe here. Vincent Weir Scientific Award winner Charlotte Walters has been awarded the Bat Conservation Trust's Vincent Weir Scientific Award. The prize is given to a UK-based student for their outstanding contribution to the conservation biology of Bats. You can read a blog about Charlotte's work here, and read her paper here. New paper accepted Chris Clements has had a new paper accepted in Oikos. The paper is "Effects of directional environmental change on extinction dynamics in experimental microbial communities are predicted by a simple model". Link to the paper is here. International Penguin Conference Ben Collen presented a talk: "Towards monitoring global penguin population change", at the 8th International Penguin Conference at the University of Bristol. Results of the global analysis to be submitted soon... August 2013
Award winning student Lucie Bland attended the Australian Student Conference on Conservation Science a couple of months ago and won first prize for her talk. Here is a follow up blog about her work on using machine learning methods to diagnose extinction risk in poorly known species. Vodafone award blog Amy Collins has been conducting a project evaluating historic baselines for biodiversity, funded by the Vodafone World of Difference award. Have a look at here most recent blogs here. July 2013
Link between extinction and public donations Chris' new paper out today evaluating the link between reported extinctions and public donations for biodiversity conservation. International Congress for Conservation Biology A number of the group will be attending the ICCB in Baltimore USA this month to present the findings of some of their recent work. Lucie Bland will be presenting in the student competition. You can download the full programme here. Global patterns of freshwater species diversity, threat and endemism Our paper published in Global Ecology & Biogeography shows that patterns of diversity, threat and endemism vary greatly for freshwater species. A link to the paper is here. June 2013
A new method for identifying rapid decline dynamics in wild vertebrate populations Recently graduated PhD student Martina Di Fonzo has published the first paper from her thesis in the journal Ecology & Evolution. She has developed a method for identifying the effects of detrimental human activities on wildlife populations. Tools such as this are critical for identifying and classifying declines and prioritising species for conservation interventions. A link to the paper is here, and you can read a blog about the findings here. |