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Tom Harwood is the Associate Director of the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. He is currently working with the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery to set local case studies within their regional biodiversity context, and build a globally consistent environmental infrastructure to support the next generation of integrative decision tools addressing biodiversity, land use and climate change.

He is a spatial ecological modeller with advanced software engineering skills who works across a wide range of environmental domains at fine resolution from local to global scales. Over the course of his career, Tom has worked on epidemiology, geneflow, weather and microclimate generation, terrain adjustment and downscaling of climate, land use and crop modelling. Tom has a particular focus on the delivery of spatial metrics for practical policy to address biodiversity loss and climate change, and joined Oxford from CSIRO in Australia in 2023, where he has been supporting national planning and monitoring for 14 years. Another key focus of Tom’s work is the estimation of the local condition of habitat using different remote sensing based approaches, as a prerequisite for biodiversity analysis.

In recent years, Tom has been responsible for the development and maintenance of time series of three Component Indicators for the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the Biodiversity Habitat Index (Goal A), the Protected Area Representativeness and Connectedness Index (Goal A) and the Bioclimatic Ecosystem Resilience Index (Target 8). A current research focus is the creation of systems to support in-country generation of these indicators using national data sources for all countries.

Publications

  • Harwood, T., Love, J.., Dreilsma, M., Brandon, C. and Ferrier, S. (2022). Staying connected: assessing the capacity of landscapes to retain biodiversity in a changing climate. Landscape Ecology, 37 (12) 3123-3139. doi: 10.1007/s10980-022-01534-5
  • Mokany, K., Ware, C., Harwood, T., Schmidt, R. and Ferrier, S. (2022). Habitat‐based biodiversity assessment for ecosystem accounting in the Murray–Darling Basin. Conservation Biology. doi: 10.1111/cobi.13915
  • Godfree, R.C., Knerr, N., Encinas-Viso, F., Albrecht, D., Bush, D., Cargill, D.C., Clements, M., Gueidan, C., Guja, L.K, Harwood, T., Joseph, L., Lepschi, B., Nargar, K., Schmidt-Lebuhn, A. & LM Broadhurst, L.M. (2021) Implications of the 2019–2020 megafires for the biogeography and conservation of Australian vegetation. Nature Communications 12, 1023. doi: 10.1038/S41467-021-21266-5
  • Ferrier, S., Harwood, T., Ware, C., Hoskins, A. (2020) A globally applicable indicator of the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems to retain biological diversity under climate change: The bioclimatic ecosystem resilience index. Ecological Indicators 117, 106554 doi: 10.1016/J.ECOLIND.2020.106554
  • Leclere, D., Obersteiner, M… Harwood, T., Young, L. et al (2020). Bending the curve of terrestrial biodiversity needs an integrated strategy. Nature 585, 551–556 doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2705-y
  • Mokany, K., Ferrier, S., Harwood, T.D., Ware, C., Di Marco, M., Grantham, H.S, Venter, O., Hoskins, A.J., JEM Watson, J.E.M. (2020). Reconciling global priorities for conserving biodiversity habitat. PNAS, 117 (18) 9906-9911 doi: 10.1073/pnas.1918373117
  • Hoskins, A.J., Harwood, T.D., Ware, C., Williams, K.J., Perry, J.J., Ota, N., Croft, J.R., Yeates, D.K.,  Jetz, W., Golebiewski, M., Purvis, A., Ferrier, S. (2020). Supporting global biodiversity assessment through high-resolution macroecological modelling: Methodological underpinnings of the BILBI framework. Environmental Modelling and Software doi: 10.1016/J.ENVSOFT.2020.104806
  • Di Marco, M., Ferrier, S., Harwood, T.D., Hoskins, A.J., Watson, J.E.M. (2019). Wilderness areas halve the risk of extinction of terrestrial biodiversity. Nature. 573:582–585. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1567-7
  • Harwood, T.D., Donohue, R.J., Williams, K.J., Ferrier, S., McVicar, T.R., Newell, G., White, M. (2016). Habitat Condition Assessment System: a new way to assess the condition of natural habitats for terrestrial biodiversity across whole regions using remote sensing data. Methods Ecol Evol., 7: 1050–1059. doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.12579
  • Hoskins, A., Bush, A., Gilmore, J., Harwood, T., Hudson, L., Ware, C., Williams, K.J., Ferrier, S. (2016). Downscaling land-use data to provide global 30″ estimates of five land-use classes Ecology and Evolution 6: 3040–3055.: doi: 10.1002/ece3.2104
  • Hatfield-Dodds, S., Schandl, H., Adams, P.D., Baynes, T.M., Brinsmead, T.S, Bryan, B.A., Chiew, F.H.S., Graham, P.W., Grundy, M., Harwood, T., McCallum, R., McCrea, R., McKellar, L.E., Newth, D., Nolan, M., Prosser, I., Wonhas, A. (2015). Australia is 'free to choose' economic growth and falling environmental pressures. Nature 527, 7576 pp 49-53 doi: 10.1038/nature16065
  • Harwood, T.D., Mokany, K., Paini, D.R. (2014). Microclimate is integral to the modeling of plant responses to macroclimate. PNAS 111:13 E1164-E116 doi: 10.1073/pnas.1400069111

Selected datasets

  • Harwood, Tom; Ware, Chris; Hoskins, Andrew; Ferrier, Simon; Bush, Alex; Golebiewski, Maciej; Hill, Samantha; Ota, Noboru; Perry, Justin; Purvis, Andy; Williams, Kristen (2022): BHI v2: Biodiversity Habitat Index: 30s global time series. v1. CSIRO. Data Collection. doi: https://doi.org/10.25919/3j75-f539
  • Harwood, Tom; Ware, Chris; Hoskins, Andrew; Ferrier, Simon; Bush, Alex; Golebiewski, Maciej; Hill, Samantha; Ota, Noboru; Perry, Justin; Purvis, Andy; Williams, Kristen (2022): BERI v2: Bioclimatic Ecosystem Resilience Index: 30s global time series. v1. CSIRO. Data Collection. doi: 10.25919/437m-8b91
  • Harwood, Tom; Ware, Chris; Hoskins, Andrew; Ferrier, Simon; Bush, Alex; Golebiewski, Maciej; Ota, Noboru; Perry, Justin; Williams, Kristen (2022): PARC: Protected Area Representativeness Index: 30s global time series. v1. CSIRO. Data Collection. doi; 10.25919/ya24-5630
  • Harwood, Tom; Ware, Chris; Hoskins, Andrew; Ferrier, Simon (2022): PARC: Protected Area Connectedness Index v2: 30s global layer 2020. v1. CSIRO. Data Collection. doi: 10.25919/kt3f-2z04
  • Harwood, Tom; Williams, Kristen; Lehmann, Eric; Ware, Chris; Lyon, Peter; Bakar, Shuvo; Pinner, Luke; Schmidt, Becky; Mokany, Karel; Van Niel, Tom; Richards, Anna; Dickson, Fiona; McVicar, Tim; Ferrier, Simon (2021): 9 arcsecond gridded HCAS 2.1 (2001-2018) base model estimation of habitat condition for terrestrial biodiversity, 18-year trend and 2010-2015 epoch change for continental Australia. v7. CSIRO. Data Collection. doi: 10.25919/nkjf-f088