About the Project
The conversion of natural habitats into intensive land use (e.g. agriculture, urban areas, mines/quarries) can lead to the loss of habitats for species and declines in overall biodiversity. This is further exacerbated by fragmentation and degradation of remaining habitat patches. Losses in biodiversity are likely to have impacts on the ecosystem functions that species provide (e.g. pollination, carbon sequestration, decomposition, natural pest control), resulting in declines in ecosystem services such as food production and climate regulation and costly impacts on society.
This studentship will examine how changes in land cover and land use affect the species important for key ecosystem functions, and how this translates into losses of ecosystem functions. These may be immediate losses of function, or a loss of resilience (i.e. increasing fragility of the system and likelihood of future losses under environmental perturbations such as extreme weather events).
The outcome of the research will be fundamental insights into how species’ communities deliver ecosystem services and will also inform appropriate environmental management to safeguard biodiversity and the services that it provides.
The project student will be based at the University of Reading, UK. The supervisor is an Associate Professor in Landscape Ecology (http://www.reading.ac.uk/biologicalsciences/about/staff/t-oliver.aspx) and has published extensively in this research field.
References
Oliver, T.H., Heard, M.S., Isaac, N.J.B., Roy, D.B., Procter, D.A., Eigenbrod, F., Freckleton, R.P., Hector, A., Orme, C.D.L., Petchey, O.L., Proenca, V., Raffaelli, D., Suttle, K.B., Mace, G.M., Martin-Lopez, B., Woodcock, B.A. & Bullock, J.M. (2015). Biodiversity and the resilience of ecosystem services. Trends Ecol. Evol., 30, 673-684.
Oliver, T.H., Isaac, N.J.B., August, T.A., Woodcock, B.A., Roy, D.B. & Bullock, J.M. (2015). Declining resilience of ecosystem functions under biodiversity loss. Nature Communications, 6.
Oliver, T.H., Marshall, H.H., Morecroft, M.D., Brereton, T.M., Prudhomme, C. & Huntingford, C. (2015). Interacting effects of climate change and habitat fragmentation on drought-sensitive butterflies. Nat. Clim. Chng., 5, 941–945.