ECOLOGY AND GLOBAL CHANGE

Working at locations and biomes across the world, the Ecology and Global Change group aims to determine fundamental ecological patterns and their causes and the nature of environmental change at a range of temporal and spatial scales. The group aims are to link plant geographical observations with physiology; to understand magnitude, rates and timing of ecosystem response to past and future climate change, and effects of terrestrial ecosystems on atmospheric CO2; to establish spatial and evolutionary responses to long-term climate change; and to distinguish natural variability from human-driven processes. EGC has made major advances in understanding short and long-term ecoclimatological interactions. Many of our projects are focussed on forest systems, the most biogeochemically active and complex terrestrial ecosystems.

The group's research interests lie in:

  • Revealing ecological patterns and what determines them. (To what extent are plant distributions controlled by soils, climate, and history?)
  • Revealing fundamental macroecological patterns and what determines them (How is diversity distributed? What factors control biomass and dynamics?)
  • What have been, what are, and what will be the effects of forests on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels?
  • Magnitude, rates, and timing of forest response to past and future change in climate and atmospheric chemistry, including threshold effects.
  • Distinguishing long-term natural variability from anthropogenic forcing.
  • Ecological space and time up-scaling
    (local to global, annual to millennial).
  • Linking palaeo-ecological and contemporary ecological research.
  • The nature and timing of climatic and environmental changes and human impacts at millennial-centennial-decadal timescales.
  • The long-term dynamics of global peatland environments.

Latest News

Manuel Gloor, David Galbraith, Oliver Phillips, Ted Feldpausch, Chris Wilson, and Jon Lloyd all either co-ordinated or contributed to the NERC-AMAZONICA consortium project meeting in Ubatuba, Brasil, March 20-23, together with many Brasilian colleagues. AMAZONICA seeks to measure the carbon balance of the 6 million km2 Amazon basin and understand its variability and drivers of the dominant fluxes, by integrating atmospheric, vegetation, and hyrdrological approaches.

Simon Lewis has won two new grants: one from the International Centre for Forestry (CIFOR), to extend plot work in Asia & Africa, and one from Gabon’s National Parks Agency to map Gabon using a marriage of LiDAR and ground-based inventory plots.

Simon Lewis presented a poster on the role of the world’s forests in the changing Earth System at ‘Planet Under Pressure’ the big pre Rio+20 science conference.