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School of Geography and the Environment

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Ecosystem Research Topics: Biodiversity and Climate Adaptation

With increasing pressures on our environment as a result of climate change and anthropogenic impacts, our research aims to increase understanding of complex human-climate-ecosystem interactions. The ECI's Biodiversity and Climate Adaptation research group is at the forefront of integrating and improving techniques for the observation and projection of the effects of environmental change on species, ecosystems and the services they provide at the international and national level. These results are feeding into the conservation management and policy areas. It is also researching adaptation options for biodiversity and how mitigation and adaptation measures in other sectors might impact on biodiversity. More specifically we are involved in:

  • using sectoral and integrated modelling techniques to project changes in the potential distributions of species and ecosystems at local, regional and global scales and to assess their adaptive capacity and vulnerability to climate change;
  • investigating the role of adaptation and mitigation measures in different sectors in offsetting the projected changes and their impacts on biodiversity;
  • costing adaptation in natural ecosystems to climate change;
  • developing a user-friendly, interactive and web-based platform for stakeholder-led climate change adaptation and vulnerability assessment which explicitly evaluates cross-sectoral interactions between the key sectors driving landscape change in Europe;
  • quantifying the contribution of different organisms, and the effects of various drivers of change, on the provision of ecosystem services;
  • assessing the implications of the above for conservation policy and management.

Projects