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Speaker: Lucas N. Joppa, PhD, Computational Science Laboratory, Microsoft Research

What we know about Earth’s biodiversity has filled plenty of books, but what we don’t know about life on Earth could fill libraries. Most of that missing information resides in the tropics. Closing the gap between what we know and don’t know will dictate how successful we are at conserving the ecological systems we all depend upon. Lucas will discuss how statistics, computation, crowd sourcing, and emerging technologies will help us understand questions ranging from how many species there are on earth to how fast they are going extinct – all from a practical conservation point of view.

Lucas Joppa is a scientist in the Computational Ecology Group at Microsoft Research, where he leads the Conservation @ Microsoft research programme and facilitates Microsoft’s partnership with the IUCN Red List. He works across the science, policy, and tools and technology space with a focus on conserving ecological systems. Lucas is an ecologist by background, with a PhD from Duke University, and has broad research interests in predictive environmental modeling, model-driven data collection, and using technology to monitor environmental processes. He is a fellow at the University of Kent’s Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, an Honorary Conservation Fellow at the Zoological Society of London, the ‘Advisor on Science and Innovation’ to UNEP-WCMC, and serves in various other advisory roles to international environmental organisations.