Training

Biographies

Confirmed speakers for this symposium are Caroline Fraser, Ben Collen and Mark Blaxter. The symposium will be chaired by Mike Rands. Available biographies are listed below.

Mike Rands

Dr Mike Rands is the Executive Director of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (a strategic collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the cluster of leading international conservation organisations in the Cambridge area - see www.cambridgeconservation.org), and based at Cambridge Judge Business School. Prior to this he was Chief Executive of BirdLife International (a global partnership of national bird and biodiversity conservation NGOs), Programme Director for the International Council for Bird Preservation and a Research Ecologist with the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust. Dr Rands has a BSc in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia, a Doctorate in Zoology from the University of Oxford, and wide ranging experience in ecological research, strategic planning, international conservation project management and institutional development. He is especially interested in interdisciplinary approaches to conservation.

conservation.cam.ac.uk

Caroline Fraser

Caroline Fraser was born in Seattle and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University in English and American literature. Her second book, Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution (Metropolitan, 2009), reports on large-scale corridor, transboundary, and ecological restoration projects on six continents. Formerly on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, she has written on natural history and other topics for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times Book Review, among other publications. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Rewilding the world

Mark Blaxter

Mark Blaxter is a zoologist by training, and a genome biologist by choice. He has worked on parasitic protozoa, parasitic and free-living nematodes, arthropods, tardigrades, annelids and other animals - in each case using genomics methods to illuminate aspects of biology and evolution. He is currently Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at the University of Edinburgh, and is Director of the GenePool Genomics Facility, a leading centre for next-generation data generation and analysis. He pioneered the use of DNA barcoding for identification of animals, and has used this technology to examine soils, sands and muds for new taxa.

nematodes.org

Ben Collen

Dr Ben Collenr Ben Collen is Head of the Zoological Society of London's Indicators and Assessments Unit, Research Fellow at the Institute of Zoology, Honorary Research Fellow at the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, and Co-Chair of the IUCN National Red List Working Group. He leads a research group of around 20 staff, students and interns on projects focussed on developing integrated measures of the status and trends of biodiversity, developing species-based indicators to enable robust understanding of human impact on biodiversity, and implementing novel monitoring techniques. He has carried out field projects in Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, Mongolia, Australia, Tanzania, the Antarctic and most recently Liberia, where he has implemented a monitoring programme for the EDGE focal species, the pygmy hippo, using remote triggered camera traps.

Abstracts

Addressing the global challenges of biodiversity conservation: where next?

Mike Rands Continued human population growth and an increase in per capita consumption have resulted in unsustainable exploitation of our planet's biodiversity. Despite increasing public and government interest in living sustainably, biodiversity continues to decline. This talk will present a brief overview of the loss of global biodiversity and why it matters. I will then focus on some of the more radical changes required to stop the unremitting loss of biodiversity. These include recognizing biodiversity as a global public good, integrating biodiversity conservation into policies for resource production and consumption, and addressing wider institutional and societal changes to enable more effective implementation of policy.

Biodiversity: Laundry Soap or Life Itself?

Caroline Fraser Biodiversity loss - the mass extinction of species set in motion by conversion of habitat, climate change, and overconsumption - threatens human life as we know it, eroding ecosystem services such as pollination and crippling sources of food, fuel, and medicines. Yet the very concept has proven difficult to convey to the general public. In recent years, the United Nations, the scientific community, and the media have struggled to publicize the urgency of the biodiversity crisis, but polling consistently shows that there is limited comprehension in the developed world, which must provide support and funding for conservation programs. This talk will discuss the impediments to understanding these critical issues and tools that can be used to break through the bafflement.

The hidden biosphere: What DNA prospecting is revealing about the variety of life on the planet

Mark Blaxter The count of described species is approaching 2 million, through the efforts of tens of thousands of researchers over the last 300 years. It might be thought that so much effort from so many enthusiastic experts had nearly catalogued all of life on our blue planet. Even though major efforts such as the oceans biodiversty programme and other expeditions to previously unexplored tropical forests are amassing impressive lists of new taxa, the overall total grows slowly. However, new prospecting methods, using an idea called DNA barcoding, are identifying unexpectedly large lists of previously undescribed taxa even in apparently well studied or unpromising habitats. For example, a survey I was part of identified hundreds of what may be new taxa on a Clyde estuary beach off the end of Prestwick runway. DNA barcoding uses the sequence of a diagnostic fragment of an organism's genome as an identifying tag, much like a product barcode identifies the contents of a can in a supermarket. Importantly, these DNA barcodes can be generated in bulk (hundreds of thousands in a single experiment) and can be generated without having to isolate the individual organism (by using total DNA extracted from the environment as a substrate for the barcoding process). The new taxa are all small (major body axes less than 1 mm) but are hyper diverse and hyper abundant. This sudden influx of data, identifying in one experiment more new taxa than previously a single researcher might meet in a lifetime's research, is challenging the systems we have in place to name and describe species, and revealing unexpected richness in even the most unpromising of environments.

Wildlife in a changing world: towards monitoring global biodiversity

Ben Collen The world's governments have made a laudable commitment to stemming loss of biodiversity. To what extent have they succeeded, and how might we develop techniques and to gauge biodiversity change, and address its loss? I present two of the most compelling biodiversity indicators, evaluating their results, efficacy and deficiencies. Indicators show that biodiversity continues to rapidly decline, across a broad range of measures of its component parts, and that the drivers of decline show no sign of abatement. To tackle these problems, there are two interlinked steps to take - we need to see the diversity of life in order to appreciate and value it, and we need to understand how it is changing in order to plan for the future. I set out a framework that can ensure biodiversity indicators aid in a proactive conservation science, influencing global policy effectively, and providing robust predictions of the impact of alternative environmental policies on biodiversity.