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May 2021
Understanding agricultural frontiers emergence in Southern and Eastern Africa: an interdisciplinary approach combining ethnography, remote sensing and decision-making models
A recording of this online seminar is available to view HERE View slides HERE Speaker: Patrick Meyfroidt, PhD, Research Associate of Belgian Research Fund and Professor, UCLouvain In this research we aim to explain the processes that condition and shape the emergence of agricultural frontiers - i.e., regions with rapid development of natural resource exploitation and land use changes - in territories considered as marginal in terms of agricultural productivity and global market connections. Our research focuses on the dry forest…
Find out more »Conservation beyond state-owned protected areas in southern Africa
A recording of this online seminar is available to view HERE Speaker: Dr Hayley Clements, Researcher, Centre for Sustainability Transitions, Stellenbosch University, South Africa It is increasingly recognized that state-owned protected areas alone will be insufficient to conserve the biodiversity on which human well-being depends. In southern Africa over the past few decades, we have seen a proliferation of conservation efforts on privately and communally owned land. In South Africa, privately conserved areas now cover over double the land area…
Find out more »June 2021
Integrated spatial planning for multi-functional landscapes
A recording of the online seminar is available to view HERE This will be a joint event with the Oxford Biodiversity Network Speaker: Dr Piero Visconti, Biodiversity, Ecology, and Conservation (BEC) Research Group Leader, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis The vast majority of extractive and productive activities undergo planning and application processes and are subject to regulation. Despite this, habitat loss and degradation are still the primary causes of global biodiversity decline, accelerating green house gas emissions and other…
Find out more »Amazon tree dominance across forest strata
A recording of this online seminar is available to view HERE Speaker: Dr Frederick Draper, Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science, Arizona State University / University of Leeds The forests of Amazonia are among the most biodiverse plant communities on Earth. Given the immediate threats posed by climate and land-use change, an improved understanding of how this extraordinary biodiversity is spatially organized is urgently required to develop effective conservation strategies. Most Amazonian tree species are extremely rare but a…
Find out more »The Role of Africa’s Tropical Forests in the Deep Human Past
A recording of this online seminar is available to view HERE Speaker: Eleanor Scerri, PhD, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in the African continent some time before 300 thousand years ago (ka). Historically, this emergence has been situated within the grassland environments of eastern or southern Africa. However, the growing consensus that there was no single centre of endemism in Africa for our species now means that a range of regions…
Find out more »Extinction and evolution of early Neotropical rainforests
A recording of this online seminar is available to view HERE Speaker: Mónica R. Carvalho, PhD, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute · Center for Tropical Paleoecology and Archaeology (CTPA) The end-Cretaceous was marked by an ecological catastrophe and extinction that eliminated nearly ¾ of life of Earth. The effects of this event on plant communities have been widely documented in higher latitudes, and have showed a consistent ecological collapse with varying extinction and recovery rates, followed by an increase in the…
Find out more »July 2021
The ecology of central African forests: insights from massive commercial datasets
A recording of this online seminar is available to view HERE Speaker: Maxime Réjou-Méchain, PhD, French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (AMAP Lab) Central African forests are the second largest continuous tropical forest in the world but vast regions remain poorly explored scientifically. The composition of central African forests and its determinants at regional scale are thus still poorly known, often being studied in limited areas and datasets or at a very coarse grain with heterogeneous occurrence records. In…
Find out more »Pre-Columbian landuse and legacy effects in Amazonia
Ecological legacies of human disturbance in Amazonian forest A recording of this online seminar is available to view HERE Speaker: Prof Mark Bush, Institute for Global Ecology, Florida Institute of Technology Mark Bush is a Professor of Biology at the Florida Institute of Technology. He earned his BSc, and PhD at the University of Hull, UK. He was a post-doc at The Ohio State University and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. In 1992 he was appointed to the faculty of Duke…
Find out more »What to plant, when and where – Restoring tropical landscapes for biodiversity and human wellbeing
A recording of this online seminar is available to view HERE Speaker: Dr Marion Pfeifer, Head of TROPical LandScapes Lab, Newcastle University In tropical landscapes, national and global forest restoration ambitions sit alongside, often competing, transformational national and regional ambitions for agri-food system development, and both are tightly coupled with rural livelihoods and human well-being at local scales. Dr Pfeifer will present ongoing research from a case study landscape in Tanzania that aims to align the needs and capacities of…
Find out more »September 2021
The past, present, and future of herbivore impacts on savanna vegetation
A recording of this online seminar is available to view HERE Speaker: Carla Staver, Associate Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University Herbivory is thought to be a key process structuring vegetation in savannas, especially in Africa where large mammal herbivore communities remain intact. Exclusion experiments consistently show that herbivores impact savanna vegetation, but effect size variation has resisted explanation, limiting our understanding of the past, present and future roles of herbivory in savanna ecosystems. In this talk, I will…
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