UK POPULATION BIOLOGY NETWORK (UKPOPNET)

UKPopNet was launched on 1 April. It is a network of researchers from five of Britain's leading research Universities - Aberdeen, East Anglia, Leeds, Sheffield, York - and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. It has core funds of £1.5M from the Natural Environment Research Council for 3 years, and additional funding from English Nature of £300k.

UKPopNet's goal is to work towards answers to questions of pressing importance to science and society, namely:

• how will biodiversity change affect the sustainability of ecosystems, landscapes, and livelihoods?
• how can we mitigate those effects?

To this end, it is funding a programme of seven research projects, all of which are inter-disciplinary and link several institutions, and a series of workshops and working groups. The Director of UKPopNet is Professor Alastair Fitter at the University of York. Details of the UKPopNet programme can be found at www.ukpopnet.org.

UKPopNet is working closely with NERC's other Centre of Excellence in population biology, the Centre for Population Biology at the Silwood Park campus of Imperial College, London, especially to develop programmes of workshops and working groups. UKPopNet is keen to involve a wide spectrum of population biologists and those in related disciplines in the workshop programme, and will make regular calls for proposals.

At York, UKPopNet scientists will be involved in three projects. Professor Peter Young (Biology, York) together with Professor Jim Prosser at Aberdeen will be looking at the influence of plant diversity on the below-ground microorganisms with which they interact. This work will explore the degree of linkage between specific plants and microbial populations belonging to different functional groups within the nitrogen cycle. Professor Chris Thomas (Biology, York) is co-ordinating a programme assessing how much detail is needed for models that predict distribution changes in plant, butterfly and bird species, which are expanding or declining. This will help to interpret past changes as well as for predicting change under different scenarios. Professor Dave Raffaelli (Environment) is part of an inter-disciplinary team lead by Dr Steve Redpath (CEH, Banchory), looking at the conflicts that arise in rural areas between stakeholders and species of conservation value that are perceived as a threat to livelihoods. The approaches and techniques developed will be used as generic tools for resolving a broad range of conflict issues in wildlife ecology.