Our Research
Conservation effectiveness and impact
Making good conservation decisions in policy and practice means knowing what works and what doesn't. Work in this area has included evaluating protected area coverage of Antarctic species and effectiveness at supporting waterbird populations. Current projects include evaluating restoration impacts to biodiversity in Scotland and Africa, and reviewing the potential for biodiversity credits to fund conservation work.
The changing poles
The Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of the world, with drastic consequences for species and people, while ice-free areas are set to rapidly expand in Antarctica. We're working to understand impacts to species across taxonomic groups, with projects looking at changes to Arctic breeding shorebird distributions, impacts on Arctic tundra plant species, how climate change may be affecting snowshoe hare - lynx population dynamics in the Yukon, and shifts in species distributions in Antarctica.
New methods and frameworks
Finding the best ways to work with and analyse data can hugely improve conservation decisions, and there is a lot to learn from other disciplines. Work in this area includes developing new ways to understand biodiversity datasets, and gleaning methodologies from other fields to improve analyses:
Past and future climate change
After the last ice age , 24,000 years ago, the Earth's climate warmed dramatically, changing species assemblages across the world, especially in the Northern hemisphere. We're working to understand how species coped with this - which ones struggled, and which ones did well? - to help better predict how species will cope in the future.