Past, Current, and Future Human Impacts on Biodiversity: Macroecology and Conservation
Our research in this theme investigates human impacts on biodiversity today, contrasts these with a deep-time perspective, and generates future projections of biodiversity. These topics are a key focus of our group Biodiversity in the Anthropocene.
The Anthropocene describes the “Age of Humans”, originally coined to describe our present time where human activities dominate the Earth more than ever. Although not recognised as an official geological period, the Anthropocene is used to describe the idea that a wide range of human impacts now influence all components of the Earth system, from subsistence hunting and the starts of agriculture through modern industrial fishing and intensive land use to future impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Our research spans across these topics, e.g. assessments of how recent biodiversity loss has changed ecological relationships over geological timescales, or projections of species’ geographic distributions under future climate and land-use change.