Biodiversity Theory for Understanding the Effects of Habitat Fragmentation at Multiple Scales

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Biodiversity, the huge variety of life on earth, is declining with species going extinct at a frightening rate. Consequently, there is a pressing need to better understand biodiversity and how it reacts to the way humans are changing the natural world. The main focus of this project is on fragmentation: the separation of different areas of habitat. When human activities cause fragmentation, for example by separating chunks of rainforest between farms or other altered landscapes, this can have devastating effects on biodiversity. Paradoxically, however, geographic processes, such as the formation of islands and mountain ranges, leave isolated fragments of habitat, but are thought to increase biodiversity by fostering the creation of new species. Reconnecting such naturally isolated landscapes can also be damaging for biodiversity by introducing alien species that compete with the native species. This project will develop a unified set of tools to study both human induced and geographic forms of fragmentation and reconnection.I will use "neutral models" as a foundation for simulations of biodiversity. Neutral models typically assume a basic set of rules about how organisms interact, but I will develop ways to make them more realistic. For example, by allowing for different types of species to exist in different habitats and allowing some species to evolve slight competitive advantages. Methods I have developed enable these models to be simulated efficiently, even on complex landscapes with many fragments of different shapes and sizes. I am especially interested in patterns of biodiversity and evolutionary history on islands and I plan to use my models to study evolution on island systems and its response to geological changes. I will then progress to predict the effects of human impacts on islands such as those of global transport networks that cause the artificial movement of species to isolated places. This work is important because being able to understand biodiversity and how it responds to change is the first step towards minimising our impacts on the environment we rely on.The effects of recent fragmentation events are not all necessarily seen immediately. Environmental changes such as fragmentation leave us with an "extinction debt", a debt of species extinctions that needs to be paid at some point in the future. One aim of the models constructed in this project is to improve methods of predicting extinction debt. I will test these models with data showing the effects of fragmenting a tropical forest by the creation of oil palm plantations. In addition to my central research work, I will continue to improve my public outreach project at www.onezoom.org, a novel and popular website where members of the public can explore the tree of life, and see how different species are related through evolution. Ten months after release it has already been frequently used for teaching, as a tool by scientists, and in displays at public venues. OneZoom can place unlimited amounts of information onto one virtual page that is explored intuitively by zooming. I hope to expand and enhance OneZoom to enable more people to discover the beauty of biodiversity and the elegance of evolution.I find the work in this proposal exciting because it addresses import issues for society. My work will focus on understanding biodiversity and how it responds to change; this is the first step towards making informed decisions about conservation to minimise our impacts on the natural world. Furthermore, my project contains significant technical challenges, which will make the best use of my existing skills in biology, maths and computing. I believe that computer simulations such as the ones I propose in this project will have an increasingly important role in future research into ecology and conservation; I am excited to have the chance to play a role in that future.