Developing practical guidance on assessing air quality regulation as a service from nature

I am Chief Scientist at BirdLife International where I lead a team who help to provide the scientific basis for the conservation programmes of the 115 Partners that form the BirdLife International Partnership. This includes assessing extinction risk for the world’s birds for the IUCN Red List, coordinating the standards and protocols for identifying and monitoring Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs) globally, identifying key threats to birds and their habitats, determining the priority actions required (for species, sites, habitats and along flyways), understanding the how people depend upon the ecosystem services delivered by IBAs, developing biodiversity indicators based on bird data, and ensuring that sound science underpins BirdLife’s policy, advocacy and communications activities.

I am the Director of the Tropical Biology Association (TBA) – an NGO that is building the capacity of conservation scientists and managers in Africa and SE Asia.  The TBA has trained over 2,800 conservation scientists from 70 countries world-wide and has a 90% contact rate with its trainees.  Many are now leading conservationists, or hold senior positions in government and non-government organisations.  Recently, my team and I have developed a new programme of online training and are exploring the huge potential that the online environment offers for bringing conservation to life.

I hold a BA and a DPhil in zoology from the University of Oxford.   I am also a founding member of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and Cambridge Conservation Forum and an organiser of the Student Conference on Conservation Science.

I lead the new ‘people conservation science’ team at RSPB’s Centre for Conservation Science, monitoring and understanding the human side of conservation issues, testing solutions to problems and evaluating whether actions work.  The team has a particular interest in measuring and valuing nature’s contributions to people, in particular natural climate solutions and sustainable agriculture, and understanding the roles of nudges, perceptions, attitudes and connection to nature for influencing behaviour change.

I am a Professor of Conservation Science in the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, where my research focuses on how to reconcile biodiversity conservation with meeting human food needs and other land-demanding activities; the costs and benefits of retaining intact ecosystems; and identifying what works in conservation. I collaborate closely with conservation practitioners and with colleagues in other disciplines, including economics and psychology. In my book Wild Hope he argues that cautious, evidence-based optimism is vital in tackling environmental challenges. I helped establish the Student Conference on Conservation Science, the Cambridge Conservation Forum, Earth Optimism, and most recently the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits.

I have worked with over 40 ecosystem service experts to build a manual that guides non-specialists through state-of-the art methods for the rapid assessment of some critical ecosystem services at their site of interest. This toolkit also emphasizes the importance of making the same estimates for the most likely alternative state of the site (say, after conversion to agriculture) so that decision-makers can assess the net consequences of such change. Early field tests in Nepal, Montserrat and the UK have been extremely promising, but have also underscored the immense demand for the tool.
My research interests – besides ecosystem services – range from forest ecology to urban wildlife in respect to diversity and distributions. I am interested in all areas of wildlife-human conflicts and wildlife ecology in human-dominated landscapes, and in the application of my research results to the conservation/management of biological resources.

After earning my Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 2004, I was an assistant professor at the Department of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture, Temple University in Philadelphia, USA, and then as a professor at the Beijing Forestry University in Beijing, China. In 2013 I moved to the Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, and assumed a teaching and research position in the Ecology program.

My research focuses on urban biodiversity monitoring and conservation, methods for quantifying urban ecosystem services and the benefits to human wellbeing, and remote sensing techniques in urban ecosystem studies. With the combination of these investigations, I aim to understand urban ecosystems’ structure and functions for their sustainable management.