Latest updates

Teacher assistant at Spring University on Ecosystem Services in Bilbao

I am at present spending some days in my beautiful hometown helping as a teaching assistant at the International Spring University on Ecosystem Services offered by the Basque Center for Climate Change. We have a diverse set of students from many different countries working on a whole suite of ecosystem services, from pollination to water provision. 

New paper accepted in Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Our paper investigating the key question of how selective logging impacts networks of interactions between species focusing on tree-liana interactions has now been accepted for publication in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Our study reveals that heavier liana loads within logged forests disproportionally affect slow-growth tree species, with cascading impacts for ecosystem services such as timber provision and carbon storage. In turn, simulation scenarios of host tree extinctions indicate that logging decreases the robustness of liana-tree networks owing to the preferential loss of heavily-infested trees (i.e. the most connected ones). We believe that our study addresses one of the core questions facing conservation biology today, and combines a high theoretical and applied interest!

Moving to a new lab!

I will soon be starting a new job at Estacion Biologica de Donana in Seville working with Ignasi Bartomeus and Montse Vila on the effect of land use change on plant-pollinator networks. 

Interviewed by BBC Future about new paper

I was recently interviewed by David Robson for BBC Future about a new paper Jaboury Ghazoul and I published on the effects that projected climate change might have on coffee cultivation and the spillover effects this might have for forests and the biodiversity they contain

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150728-coffee-the-bitter-end-of-our-favourite-drink

Presentation at the ATBC annual meeting in Honolulu

I had the great pleasure to present some preliminary results of some work I am doing in collaboration with agricultural economist Antoine Champetier on tradeoffs between conservation and economic goals in a coffee-growing landscape in India. 

New paper published in PLoS ONE!

A new paper written by Jaboury Ghazoul and myself has been published in PLoS ONE on the effects of projected climate change on coffee distribution in the future and its implications for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provision.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133071

Presentation at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting, Sacramento, California

I recently presented some preliminary results on the future distribution of areas suitable for coffee cultivation across the globe given projected climate change and how this could affect forested areas.