Jane is an ecologist in the Leverhume Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York (UK), researching how species are responding to climate change and habitat degradation. Her research has quantified rates of range shifting, the role of habitat availability in altering shifting rates, and the benefits of improving landscape connectivity. Much of her work focuses on UK species, especially butterflies, for which there are trend data for 50+ years. Jane also studies tropical ecosystem, exploring the consequences of climate change and rainforest fragmentation for biodiversity. Jane translates research findings into policy, for example through writing the British Ecological Society policy report on ‘Protected areas and nature recovery’ (2022), and providing evidence to a House of Lords select committee on Protected Areas. She received an OBE in the King’s birthday honours list in 2023 for services to conservation, and is a trustee and President of the Royal Entomological Society.   

Title: Helping biodiversity thrive in Anthropocene landscapes.

Abstract: During the Anthropocene, our activities are having huge impacts on the climate and on natural habitats, which are raising concerns about biodiversity losses and how we can help nature to thrive. I will discuss our research which is examining the ecological impacts of climate and habitat changes, and how we can help species respond, adapt and survive climate change. Over many decades, the general public has been very keen to record biodiversity, and so the UK has some of the best datasets for understanding how biodiversity has changed over the past 4 decades. I will discuss how species are disappearing from some sites as a consequence of climate change, why range shifts northwards and uphill are slowed or halted in highly transformed landscapes, and how climate change may also have impacts on genetic diversity. We are currently examining the consequences of woodland creation for UK biodiversity, and whether it is important to account for woodland connectivity (spoiler – it is!). Our research findings reveal the dynamism of nature, and the reshuffling of species at sites, requiring a fundamentally different approach to conservation.

Susanne has worked on a broad range of topics in ecology, evolution and conservation of mammals, amphibians and birds. Her work is focussed on macroevolution, macroecology, and biogeography, and in particular on developing interdisciplinary research that unites knowledge, data, and methods across biology and palaeontology. She is especially interested in the relationships of biodiversity above the species level with the abiotic environment in time and space and the processes underlying these relationships, with the ultimate goal of understanding the effects of climate change and mountain building on large-scale biodiversity dynamics. Susanne is excited to join iDiv through a professorship at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena from October 2024. At the time of writing, she holds a cooperation professorship of Goethe University Frankfurt with the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) that is funded by the Leibniz Competition of the Leibniz Foundation.

Title: Biodiversity in the Anthropocene: a new iDiv research team investigating the past, present, and future of terrestrial vertebrates

Abstract: How has the amazing diversity of life on Earth evolved, what shapes biodiversity patterns through time and in space, and what are the effects of increasing human dominance of the Earth system on biodiversity? Those big questions set the stage for my research. I will give a broad overview over some past work and future plans, to introduce me and my team to the larger iDiv community. In particular, we work at the interface of macroecology and macroevolution, focussing on understanding the ecological and evolutionary processes that underlie large-scale patterns of diversity in space and time. Our research spans conceptual advances, large global dataset compilations, and empirical work on global or regional datasets across many species, particularly mammals and birds. For example, we work on interdisciplinary approaches that unite data from the fossil record and the present day to bridge ecology, evolution, and palaeobiology. To address questions on global or regional patterns of difference aspects of biodiversity, we often unite biogeographic data with molecular phylogenies and data on species traits to calculate metrics like species richness, phylogenetic diversity, and functional diversity, and to relate their spatial patterns with potential abiotic, biotic, and anthropogenic drivers. Our work is also relevant for global conservation priorities, including research on the drivers of extinction risk and on the potential responses of species and assemblages to ongoing and future climate and land-use change. With an introduction of our different research themes and some examples of recent work, I hope to convince you that contrasting the geological dynamics of diversity and its long-term evolutionary history with the biodiversity patterns we currently observe in the Anthropocene will provide a solid basis for predicting the future of biodiversity under global change.