Our Research Projects
Below is a complete list of all the research projects that the Oxford Long-term Ecology Lab is involved in. Our research covers Long Term Ecology, Resource Stewardship Technologies, and Biodiversity and Conservation.
The Vector Atlas: Analyses-Ready Data and Spatial Models Specifically Tailored to Inform Malaria Vector Control
Maps are a powerful tool. They can illustrate the distribution of mosquito vector species known to transmit some of the world's most debilitating diseases and ... Continue reading
What ecosystem services are provided by rewilding?
Rewilding with large herbivores is a conservation strategy being deployed in multiple countries across the world. Putting drivers in place such as ... Continue reading
The role of plant biodiversity in delivering ecosystem services that underpin human well-Being
Rosaria's thesis aims to understand the multiple different Ecosystem Services (ES) provided by plant biodiversity in tropical seasonal climates using ethnobotany, vegetation, and food ... Continue reading
How does changing ozone exposure affect plant health?
Background: Tropospheric ozone forms via photocatalysis of a free radical mechanism between NOx (NO and NO2) hydrocarbons and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs)1, resulting from industrial and ... Continue reading
Hydromorphological, hydraulic and ecological effects of engineered log jams: a Natural Flood Management technique
The term Natural Flood Management (NFM) describes a range of techniques that seek to reduce flood hazards by restoring innate hydrological and morphological processes, features ... Continue reading
Soil carbon and farm productivity implications of Regenerative Agriculture
Soil carbon sequestration on farmland has the dual potential to help mitigate anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and reverse soil degradation, through building soil organic matter. ... Continue reading
Vegetation response to climate change: a functional traits-based approach
Nicola Kühn 's DPhil research investigates the role that traits play in determining vegetation response to climate change with a specific focus in South Africa ... Continue reading
Plant-derived toxins and climate change
How will climate change affect the toxicity of plants? This project aims to develop a palaeoecological proxy for plant-derived toxins from calcium oxalate crystals, the ... Continue reading
HumBug: we are using smartphones to record and identify mosquitoes by their flight tones
Mosquitoes are notoriously dangerous, responsible for over one billion cases of disease and around a million deaths each year. Malaria alone kills ... Continue reading
Mammal defauntation and trophic cascades in Ethiopia
Large mammals have been widely recognized to play key roles in ecosystem functioning. In many ecosystems, small mammals also drive ecosystem ... Continue reading
Evidence Based Forestry & Landuse
Other sectors have well-established procedures for using systematic, evidence-informed approaches to science-policy dialogue. These include Health Care (Cochrane Collaboration), ... Continue reading
Palaeo-Trophic Cascades (PACE)
The extinction of a number of large herbivores (e.g. Mammuthus primigenius, woolly mammoth and Megaloceros giganteus, giant deer) at the end of the Pleistocene epoch ... Continue reading
Paleo-Progressive Nitrogen Limitation (PNL)
Is nitrogen (N) availability to plants increasing or decreasing over time? Global environmental changes such as N deposition, climate warming and increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations are ... Continue reading
Marine Local Ecological Footprinting Tool (Marine LEFT)
Marine LEFT provides information about context, habitats, biodiversity, competing uses, processes and threats in the world's oceans. http://www.marineleft.ox.ac.uk
The Central American Isthmus: Ecological Dynamics of the Middle-Late Holocene
An ever-increasing demand for agriculture while conserving biodiversity, maintaining livelihoods, and providing critical ecosystem services is one of the largest challenges for tropical land management ... Continue reading
The Global Pollen Project
The Global Pollen Project is an initiative with two main strands. First, it provides a platform for people working with pollen to get help with ... Continue reading
The Role of Soil Nutrients in Arctic Greening
The overarching research aim of this thesis was to assess whether recently observed shrub productivity trends in Arctic ecosystems may have been influenced by long-term nitrogen ... Continue reading
Local Ecological Footprinting Tool (LEFT)
LEFT is an internet-based decision support tool for evaluating the pattern of relative ecological value across a landscape. Such knowledge can help minimise environmental impact when ... Continue reading
Determining the impacts of climate change on British wildflowers
How will climate change affect British wildflowers and their insect pollinators? This research aims to determine how British wildflowers will be affected by changes in temperatures, ... Continue reading
Foraging behaviour of Bombus pomorum that went extinct from the British Isles in the mid-nineteenth century
This research has produced the first direct evidence of the foraging behaviour of the bumblebee species Bombus pomorum (Panzer, 1805) that went extinct from the ... Continue reading
Restoring native biological diversity in the Galápagos Islands: determination of baseline ecological conditions
The Galápagos Islands are a National Park, UNESCO World Heritage site and Biosphere Reserve and are globally renowned both for their ecological value ... Continue reading
Forest Conservation in a Changing World: using palaeoecology to improve the effectiveness of conservation planning in the Apuseni Mountain, NW Romania
One region in Europe where there are still exceptionally large tracts of 'undisturbed' natural temperate forests is in Romania. In order to plan ... Continue reading
Potential impacts of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem function in small-holder agro-ecosystems in Northern Ghana
Small-holder farmers play an influential role in prevailing environmental conditions across the globe - constituting 80% people in sub-Saharan Africa alone, and 2 billion globally. ... Continue reading
Rapid Ecosystem Service Assessment Technique (RESAT) : An indicator methodology for assessing ecosystem processes and function, goods and services, and human well-being in agricultural landscapes
Despite the widening debate on ecosystem service (ES) provision and growing spectrum of ecosystem assessment tools, land managers and researchers in the ES community still ... Continue reading
How effective are on-farm conservation land management strategies for preserving ecosystem services in developing countries?
While ecosystem service valuation is commonly justified as a tool that can enhance decision making at landscape level through monitoring, planning or prioritization, there is ... Continue reading
Systemic Integrated Adaptation planning framework
Systemic Integrated Adaptation (SIA) Framework is a three-year, multidisciplinary research initiative exploring the resilience and adaptive capacity of food systems to climate change. Employing systems-thinking, ... Continue reading
EcoSET
Biodiversity provides vital goods and services, such as pollination, food provision, carbon sequestration and water regulation that strengthen economic prosperity. While conservation planning for biodiversity ... Continue reading
NaturEtrade
This demonstration project has been successfully completed. The overall aim of NaturEtrade was to develop an innovative solution to the loss of ecologically-rich land in ... Continue reading
Linking soil management to ecosystem functions and services in oil palm plantings
The rapid expansion of oil palm cultivation in Southeast Asia in the past decades has led to deforestation, loss of biological diversity, poor water quality ... Continue reading
Resilience of Tropical Peat Swamp Forests
Tropical peat swamp forests are undergoing some of the most rapid rates of deforestation and land use change on earth. As well as being rich ... Continue reading
Holocene tree-cover in Europe and implications for re-wilding strategies
This thesis addresses the methodological challenges of determining the variability of large herbivore populations through time and their impact on ... Continue reading
Impact of EU Agri-environment policies on ecosystem functioning
Catherine's DPhil focuses on assessing the effectiveness of EU agri-environment schemes in promoting ecosystem functioning and service delivery within agricultural landscapes. Agri-environment schemes have been ... Continue reading
Resilience of Southeast Asian Lowland Rainforest to large-scale climatic changes
Dipterocarp forests of Southeast Asia are one of the oldest and most diverse forests on the planet. Due to their high timber value they have ... Continue reading
Disturbance regimes in Central African Rainforests
The Central African forest is the second largest contiguous forest area in the world, hosting the highest diversity of large mammals (Primack and Corlett 2005). ... Continue reading
Retrospectively evaluating the effectiveness of Community Based Conservation projects in Madagascar
Herizo Andrianandrasana DPhil project involved an evaluation of the effectiveness of Community based Conservation (CBC) in mitigating threats, saving biodiversity, protecting ecosystem services and enhancing ... Continue reading
80,000 years of climate change and forest resilience in the Eastern Mediterranean
This research aimed to systematically investigate the influence of climate variability on vegetation dynamics and landscape processses in the Bekaa Valley and on the Lebanon ... Continue reading
Optimising Protected Area Networks in Europe
Europe not only contains multiple biogeographic regions and considerable habitat space for biodiversity, but also boasts a plethora of conservation designations on various levels of ... Continue reading
Unravelling biofuel impacts on ecosystem services, human wellbeing and poverty alleviation in Sub-Saharan Africa
Members from other institutions Stockholm Environment Institute Dr. Francis Johnson (http://www.sei-international.org/staff?staffid=26) & Dr. Caroline Ochieng (http://www.sei-international.org/staff?staffid=325) Council for Scientific and Industrial Research of South Africa: Dr. ... Continue reading
Agro-economic and ecological impact of GM and non-GM cotton farming in India
The commercialisation of genetically modified (GM) crops has raised a polarised debate concerning environmental risks and the potential socio-economic impacts on farmers. A proper assessment ... Continue reading
Long Term Biodiversity Change of Canary Islands
The ancient forests of Macaronesia (Canary Islands and Cape Verde) and their sensitivity to environmental change... Continue reading
Floods & Droughts: Environmental Dynamics in the Upper Zambezi Valley
This is a 3 year Leverhulme Trust funded project (commencing October 2010) in collaboration with Professor David Thomas and Professor Kathy Willis focused on environmental ... Continue reading
BioSound
Biodiversity monitoring is a key element of environmental and ecosystem protection planning and policy design. For a large number of animal species that produce ... Continue reading