urbanization

Urbanization is one of the most disruptive forms of land use, severely impacting on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Given the continuing expansion of cities and the ongoing concentration of human populations in urbanized areas, understanding how biodiversity can be maintained in anthropogenic landscapes is paramount both for biodiversity conservation as well as for promoting healthy livelihoods for people.

Our research focuses on investigating at which spatial scales anthropogenic selection pressures operate most strongly on urban biodiversity, using a suite of phenotypic stress markers (i.e. body condition, hormone levels, fluctuating asymmetry,…) and fitness proxies (such as breeding success) to quantify how individuals and populations respond to urbanization.

We couple insights derived from this work with our expertise in spatial modelling of habitat suitability to predict the effects of urbanization scenarios on species, thereby helping to inform urban planning scenarios to maximize urban biodiversity. 

HABITat degradation and fragmentation

​Habitat degradation and fragmentation are among the main direct drivers of biodiversity loss worldwide. Using both temperate and tropical systems, we study how these global change drivers impact on the ecology, demography and behavior of animals, and how they affect population persistence and extinction risks.

Our tropical research focuses on assessing how community composition, structure and species richness vary across human-modified landscapes, with a view of formulating management recommendations for establishing resilient ecological networks. In temperate areas, we study how changes in food web structure resulting from degradation and fragmentation affect ecosystem functions such as pest control and disease dynamics. Combining field observations with lab experiments, we assess how environmentally induced stress affects host-pathogen dynamics in a broad range of vertebrate species.

​Our main aim here is to contribute to a better understanding of the causal links between environmental change, individual physiological condition and disease susceptibility and outbreaks. 

invasive species distributions

​Invasive species, climate change, and land use change all belong to the top-five major threats to biodiversity worldwide, yet very few studies consider interactive effects between these global change drivers. This is problematic, as neglecting land-cover change can lead to overestimating risk when modeled climate suitability is not matched by availability of suitable habitat, or underestimating risk when climate change and land-cover change interact positively on the suitability for invasion.

We apply macroecological modeling techniques to  jointly consider climate and land use change impacts on species’ invasion risks. For characterizing current and future land uses we have developed expertise in remote sensing data such as Copernicus landcover data and Earth System Model estimates of the combined effects of land use and fossil fuel emissions on the global carbon–climate system. 

By developing accurate tools to forecast the spread of invasive species we generate insights of relevance to international and regional policy and management of invasive species.