Environmental change

Our conservation research tackles three of the biggest threats to biodiversity: habitat fragmentation, over-harvesting and climate change. Our results inform conservation policy and practice globally.

For example, research on how species move across fragmented landscapes in response to climate change has led to an increase in landscape-scale conservation strategies, now known to increase the long-term survival of species.

This has altered practical land designation and management for conservation over millions of hectares in the UK, as well as affecting the strategies adopted by most global conservation organisations and countries in the world.

Meanwhile, our work on poaching in Africa has led to more effective ranger patrols across iconic protected areas and has helped ensure lower poaching in core regions.

Social structure has been shown to play a key role in life history, information transmission, cooperation, group movement and reaction to perceived threat.

Our fundamental research has practical consequences, for example using social models for birds to assess the flock collision hazards caused by wind farm developments, and using social network models to assess resilience of social animals, from wood ants, assessing the conservation implications of forestry management strategies, to killer whales, assessing adaptability to changing food abundance, and also projecting extinction risk from airborne disease in an endangered population.