Seminar followed by Q&A and drinks – attend in person or join online – all welcome

Abstract: Nature recovery depends on turning ecological data into clear, timely, and actionable insights. This talk explores how sensing technologies, automated acoustics, and AI can strengthen that data-to-decision journey by improving how we monitor ecosystems and interpret change. Through examples from her research, Kate will outline the opportunities and limitations of applying AI to real-world ecological data, and show how better tools can support more effective decisions for nature recovery.

Biography: Kate Jones is an ecologist whose interdisciplinary research investigates the interface of ecological and human health. Her research understands the impact of global land use and climate change on ecological and human systems, with a particular focus on emerging infectious diseases from animals. Kate’s work also focuses on generating better tools for monitoring the status of wildlife populations, developing some of the first applied artificial intelligence tools for monitoring ecosystems, and further understanding how citizen science data can be used to understand biodiversity trends. Kate is the Director of The People and Nature Lab at UCL’s new cross-disciplinary campus in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (UCL East). Kate has held appointments at the Zoological Society of London, University of Cambridge, Columbia University, University of Virginia, and Imperial College London. She has written over 150 articles and book chapters in prestigious journals, is a UK government scientific advisor, chaired The Bat Conservation Trust for 5 years, and served as an expert advisor to the UK’s Climate Change Committee. Kate won the Leverhulme Prize for outstanding contributions to Zoology in 2008, and in 2022 won both ZSL’s Marsh Award for Conservation Biology and British Ecology Society’s Marsh Award for Ecology.