Toward an integrated approach to the mapping and mitigating of global pressures on biodiversity

I am currently heavily involved in exploring a range of ways of integrating conservation science and policy especially through the development of evidence-based conservation. I have written The Conservation Handbook and From Individual Behaviour to Population Biology and have edited Managing Habitats for Conservation, Ecological Census Techniques, Behaviour and Conservation, Conservation Science and Action and Bird Ecology and Conservation: a Handbook of Techniques and most recently Transforming Conservation: a practical guide to evidence and decision making.

Read an interview with Bill published in ‘This Cambridge Life’ by the University of Cambridge.

I am a conservation biologist with a background in research on the impacts of agriculture on biodiversity, and on how food production and biodiversity conservation might be reconciled. I am now based in southern Brazil, where my focus is on the conservation of one of the regions with most endemic and threatened birds in the world – the Atlantic Rainforests.

Lucas Joppa is a scientist in the Computational Ecology Group at Microsoft Research, where he leads the Conservation @ Microsoft research programme and facilitates Microsoft’s partnership with the IUCN Red List. He works across the science, policy, and tools and technology space with the goal of facilitating the conservation of ecological systems. Lucas is an ecologist by background, with a PhD from Duke University, and has broad research interests in predictive environmental modeling, model-driven data collection, and using technology to monitor environmental processes. He is a fellow at the University of Kent’s Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, an Honorary Conservation Fellow at the Zoological Society of London, the ‘Advisor on Science and Innovation’ to UNEP-WCMC, and serves in various other advisory roles to international environmental organisations.

My role involves the provision of technical and scientific support to the work of the Species Survival Commission – the largest global network of conservation professionals – and to foster uptake of Commission-based research and expertise in conservation-relevant decision-making. My main areas of interest are in species conservation, protected areas, and mammalian taxonomy and biogeography (particularly Africa).

My work focuses on understanding pressures and threats to protected areas and how globally applied management effectiveness tools like the Management Effectiveness Tracking Tool (METT) can be used to inform what makes protected areas effective in reducing human pressure. I also work on evaluating the effectiveness of protected areas internationally combining management effectiveness data with data on changes in biodiversity outcomes.

My research builds on a strong tradition of mapping human pressure using remotely-sensed data (e.g. the Human Footprint) to explore patterns of effectiveness across the globe. I am also interested in understanding how pressure as measured by remote sensed data, which often represents drivers or sources of pressure can be combined with on the ground perceptions of pressure to better understand how human processes translates in to biodiversity loss.

I am a tester and trainer of the Conservation Mapping Application.

I manage the IUCN Red List including capturing pressures on species, and am involved in developing and maintaining the IUCN Threats Classification Scheme.