A future for nature: quantitative perspectives on land and biodiversity under global change
Our understanding of nature is incomplete, and nowhere is this more evident than when faced with the challenge of maintaining a viable natural world under the dual pressures of land use and climate change. Differing values and ad hoc solutions risk an incoherent and piecemeal response, with nebulous consequences. We need clearly defined measures of state, consequences and change framed within globally consistent world-views to effectively plan for the future.

Tom will present one possible approach using examples from the past decade of his work with colleagues at CSIRO in Australia, using community to metacommunity models of biodiversity in combination with new approaches to remotely sense land use and habitat condition. These allow us to consider impacts of land use and climate change in units of species loss at fine resolution over large extents. We can potentially use this information to support spatially explicit adaptation planning in combination with other approaches and values systems. There will be minimal equations but lots of diagrams and interesting (if sometimes a bit frightening) maps.

Biography:

Tom Harwood is the new Associate Director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford and is a spatio-temporal ecological modeller with interests spanning scales from sub-individual to global and topics including epidemiology and lettuce. His modelling has contributed to the first application of UN-SEEA Experimental Ecosystem Accounts, the IPBES Global Assessment and three Component Indicators for the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework
Date: 23 June 2023, 16:15
Venue: Dyson Perrins Building, off South Parks Road OX1 3QY
Venue Details: Main Lecture theatre
Speaker: Tom Harwood (University of Oxford)
Organising department: School of Geography and the Environment
Organisers: Carlyn Samuel (University of Oxford), Jane Applegarth (University of Oxford, Oxford University Centre for the Environment)
Host: Professor Yadvinder Malhi (University of Oxford)
Part of: Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and the Biodiversity Network seminar series
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: https://bookwhen.com/oxfordbiodiversitynetwork#focus=ev-s0vt-20230623161500
Audience: Public
Editor: Carlyn Samuel