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May 2019
Restructuring of biodiversity in the Anthropocene under habitat loss and climate change
Listen to podcast | View slides Speaker: Dr Tim Newbold, Research Fellow, Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research, UCL Rapid environmental changes are driving major changes in the world's biodiversity. In this talk, Tim will present his recent work investigating how habitat loss and climate change are impacting the world's biodiversity. He will highlight the tropics as an area where his work has shown biodiversity to be particularly sensitive to environmental changes. Tim's work aims to understand how biodiversity…
Find out more »Inter- and intra-specific variation in tropical canopy phenology: Insights from field data and images from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)
Listen to podcast | (no slides available) Speaker: Dr Stephanie Bohlman, Associate Professor in the School of Forest Resources and Conservation, University of Florida (currently on sabbatical at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, Leipzig) Phenology, a sentinel of climate change and mediator of ecosystem processes, is poorly understood in tropical versus temperate forests. Our lack of quantitative data results in part from the high diversity and limited synchrony of phenological patterns within and among tropical species, as…
Find out more »Bridging avian biodiversity shortfalls in the Neotropics
Listen to podcast | View slides here Speaker: Dr Alexander C. Lees, Senior Lecturer in Conservation Biology, Manchester Metropolitan University Securing the long-term resilience of world’s most speciose avifauna, that of the Neotropics, requires spatially and temporally explicit data to inform decisions. Alex examines gaps in our knowledge of the region’s avifauna through the lens of the biodiversity shortfall concept; the gaps between realized knowledge and complete knowledge. This framework serves as a useful tool to take stock of…
Find out more »Improving plant allometry by fusing forest models and remote sensing
Listen to podcast | View slides here Speaker: Jerome Chave, PhD, UPS Toulouse Allometry determines how tree shape and function scale with size. Allometric relationships help scale processes from individual to global scale, and they constitute a core component of vegetation models. Allometric relationships have been expected to emerge from optimization theory, yet current theory does not suitably predict empirical data. The fusion of high-resolution data, such as airborne laser scanning, with individual-based forest modelling offers insight into how…
Find out more »Deconstructing Compensation: Benefit-sharing and co-dependency between oil companies and indigenous communities in Russia and Alaska
Listen to podcast | View slides here Speaker: Maria Tysiachniouk, Research Fellow, Department of Geography, Durham University; the Centre for Independent Social Research, Russia There is little doubt the benefit sharing policy for Arctic regions is essential, as it impacts the livelihoods of thousands of Arctic residents who depend on land, sea, and access to natural resources. It is important that the energy sector shares a portion derived from the resource extraction with the local inhabitants in an equitable, transparent,…
Find out more »June 2019
The phylogeographic structure of tropical plant communities and populations – insights on environmental filtering, dispersal limitation and biogeographic barriers
Listen to podcast | View slides here Speaker: Olivier Hardy, PhD, Universite Libre de Bruxelles The phylogeographic structure refers to the way phylogenetically related species or populations are distributed across spatio-environmental gradients. These patterns are studied in the frameworks of community ecology (inter-specific level) and population genetics (intra-specific level) but usually using different data analysis tools. However, it is possible to use a common descriptive framework at the two levels and attempt a comparison. Here, Olivier will use examples…
Find out more »Inside a tropical montane forest: Understanding patterns of plant diversity and ecosystem functioning across the Andes
Listen to podcast | View slides here Speaker: Luis Cayuela Delgdo, Associate Professor, Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain Andean tropical montane forests (TMFs) are one of the world's most threatened terrestrial ecosystems. Despite representing a small fraction of the world’s tropical forests, they hold high levels of species richness and endemism, and are therefore critical for the conservation of global biodiversity. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the mechanisms shaping species composition, diversity and turnover in TMFs, as well as key…
Find out more »Leaf temperatures in tropical forests: what do we know and why is it important?
Listen to podcast | View slides here Speaker: Dr Sophie Fauset, Lecturer in Environmental Science, University of Plymouth In this talk, Sophie will give an introduction to the biophysics of leaf temperatures, explaining why they are different from air temperatures, and what relevance this has for leaf functioning. She will present research performed in Brazil on current patterns of leaf temperatures measured in the field, and how they respond to warming and elevated CO2 concentration from a greenhouse study.…
Find out more »October 2019
Nutrient limitation in tropical forests: what we know, what we don’t know, what we really need to know
Listen to podcast | View slides here Speaker: Prof James Dalling, Department of Plant Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Over the last decade attention has been refocused on the role of soil nutrients, particularly soil phosphorus availability, in structuring the local and landscape composition of tropical forests, and potentially in constraining primary productivity. Jim will review the evidence from global ForestGeo plots and landscape studies in Panama that soil nutrients influence species distributions, compositional and functional beta diversity,…
Find out more »November 2019
Amazon forest responses to drought: scaling from individuals to ecosystems
Listen to podcast Speaker: Dr Scott Saleska, Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona Scaling from individuals or species to ecosystems is a fundamental challenge of modern ecology and understanding tropical forest response to drought is a key challenge of predicting responses to global climate change. Scott will synthesize his developing understanding of these twin challenges by examining individual and ecosystem responses to the 2015 El Nino drought at two sites in the central Amazon of Brazil, near Manaus…
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