Dr Rob Salguero-Gomez - Department of Biology, University of Oxford
Quantifying & predicting resilience from individuals, to populations, to whole communities.
Understanding and predicting the responses to natural systems to disturbances has been a fundamental goal of Ecology since its birth as a science. Still, the study of resilience has been plagued with discussions and disagreements regarding how to define this term, which have ultimately limited progress in the area, let alone developments to integrate resilience across levels of biological organisation.
In this talk, I will overview key works developed in my lab aimed at integrating how individual responses to disturbances scale up to changes in population trends and community assembly. The approaches used, contrary to the status quo in the discipline, do not make assumptions about ecological systems being at or close to stationary equilibrium, and so they offer a more realistic depiction of how nature operates and responds to the human-led disturbances they are current experiencing. I will also discuss how novel technologies (autonomous robots, UAVs, LiDAR) can help vastly expedite our assessments and predictions of nature resilience towards a more cost-effective recovery.
If you would like to meet the speaker and/or join a dinner at 6 pm in the Eagle the day before, on 6th March, please contact Ash Simkins - ats43@cam.ac.uk