Biodiversity Institute

The Biodiversity Institute takes a lead in the science of biodiversity and also develops frameworks, structures and novel technologies to implement this science into management and policy.

The planet's biodiversity is under threat and experiencing radical changes at a rate unprecedented in history.

Our focus on biodiversity beyond protected areas and our integration of new technologies will help businesses and society develop best practices to conserve biodiverse ecosystems into the next century.

The Institute has three key themes:

Ecological and evolutionary processes: We focus on increasing the understanding of which ecological and evolutionary processes are important for creating the right conditions for resilience, persistence and the prevention of thresholds and irreversible changes in ecosystems. We also research how sensitive they are to environmental changes over short and long time-scales and how to devise policies to conserve them.

Biodiversity beyond protected areas: Climate change and human impact are putting increasing pressure on existing protected areas and as a result, biodiversity conservation needs to take place beyond these reserves. We aim to address the lack of scientific research into the processes and mechanisms that could enable these areas to support biodiverse ecosystems into the next century.

Biodiversity technologies: We aim to develop automated tools that enable easy identification of species and the assessment of important regions for biodiversity conservation beyond protected areas. We are also developing web-based tools that can map dynamic features of any landscape in the world to inform on the important ecosystem properties and functions that it supports.