Long-term Ecology
The history of biodiversity and ecosystems
We collect and analyse data spanning a wide range of temporal and spatial scales to understand the processes that underpin diversity, distribution and abundance of plants and animals across global landscapes in space and time.
Biodiversity & Conservation
Species and ecosystems
This evidence-base is then used to understand biodiversity baselines, the resilience of biological communities to various drivers of change, ecological risk associated with different landscapes, the effects of different aspects of biodiversity on human health (good and bad) and the impacts of different land-management practices over time on natural capital assets and ecosystem system flows.
Resource Stewardship Technologies
Tools to inform environmental descision making
Outputs from our work are disseminated through web-based tools and technologies, academic publications,policy briefings, workshops, conferences, and social media and we engage with a variety of stakeholders in industry, academia, the general public and governance to ensure our research achieves maximum societal as well as research impact.
Lab News
Cymru Collaborations
Last weekend Anna Lee-Jones, NERC DPhil student in the OXLEL group, traveled to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) site in Bangor, Wales to discuss an experimentation collaboration with plant ecophysiologist Dr Felicity Hayes: My trip to CEH Bangor was a great success last week, and well worth the hours stuck in traffic spent on the M6. I was able to take a tour of the Air Pollution Facility just outside Bangor where CEH run eight glasshouses (or "solardomes") ranging ... Continue reading
Government policy and targets insufficient to stem the tide of UK biodiversity loss
Professor Kathy Willis gave oral evidence as an expert witness to the Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) inquiry into the the protection and enhancement of biodiversity and ecosystems in the UK November 2020. The findings of this committee were published yesterday. The full report can be found at the following site but the EAC's key findings of this report are as follows: Existing Government policy and targets are inadequate to address plummeting biodiversity loss. This is made worse by ... Continue reading
Natural capital in the nation’s forests
OxLEL was delighted to host Dr Eleanor Tew as guest speaker at our weekly lab meeting on the 11th of June. Dr Tew is the national Natural Capital and Resilience Programme Manager for Forestry England and is a visiting scholar at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge. Dr Tew discussed some of the actions Forestry England is taking to maintain and enhance the ecosystem services provided by public forests, such as recreation opportunities and carbon sequestration. One programme she described ... Continue reading
New randomised control trial of the smartphone Humbug acoustic monitoring system starting this week in Tanzania
This Friday (23rd April 2021) a randomised controlled trial (RCT) aiming to understand use and uptake of the smartphone HumBug acoustic monitoring system will begin with 148 participants recruited from four villages in Tanzania: Kivukoni, Minepa, Mavimba and Milola. Each participant will receive a budget smartphone pre-loaded with our Mozzwear application mosquito sensor, and a modified mosquito HumBug bed net containing a pocket where the mosquito sensor will be placed. The study requires each participant to switch on the mozzwear sensor before ... Continue reading
Mapping recreational amenity in Europe
Peter Long, Sandra Nogue, David Benz and Kathy Willis recently published a paper in Frontiers in Biogeography demonstating how to map the ecosystem service of outdoor recreation across Europe. The model used data on numbers of visitors to certain sites to predict visitor density across the whole continent on the basis of human population density, social media records and environmental variables. We show that the most spectacular landscapes are not actually the locations where the amount of recreational visitors is ... Continue reading
Research Blog
The value of systematic evidence synthesis for land use decision-making and practice
By Dr Gillian Petrokofsky on November 9, 2021
Systematic evidence syntheses were adopted in environmental management and conservation in 2006 “to promote and deliver evidence syntheses on issues of greatest concern to environmental policy and practice as a public service.” Since then, the tools developed within ... Continue reading
Do flying cows have to pay a carbon offset?
By Professor Katherine J. Willis on October 26, 2021
Last week I learnt an interesting fact relating to carbon offsets when flying – if you fly business class you need to pay x 2.5 more carbon offset because of the additional space that you take up. This made me ... Continue reading
Ancient Plants, New Approaches
By Anna Lee-Jones on September 29, 2021
Encased within the unique Ryhnie Chert fossil system are some of the best-preserved early land plants in the world. Using pioneering digital technologies, we were able to reveal the developmental secrets of a transitional rooting organ which has laid hidden ... Continue reading