Summary
Climate change is widely recognized as an important threat to biodiversity, raising important challenges for conservation. Here I will discuss recent and ongoing work to estimate future distribution shifts and extinction risk under changing climate, including methodological developments to improve predictions. I will focus on work looking at potential shifts in Arctic vegetation and implications for feedbacks to the global climate system, as well as extinction risk among amphibians and reptiles in North America.
Biography
Richard Pearson is a lecturer in the Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research, which is a research centre within the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at UCL. Richard completed his Doctorate in biogeography at the University of Oxford in 2004. From 2005-2013 he was a postdoc and then research scientist at the American Museum of Natural History, where he maintains affiliation as a Research Associate.
Richard’s research focuses on the biogeography of animals and plants: Where are species distributed? Why are they distributed there? How do distributions change over time? Deepening our understanding of these questions requires a melding of ecological and evolutionary theory, and will be crucial for developing effective conservation strategies in a time of rapid global environmental change. He addresses these challenges using modern computational technologies, including Geographic Information Systems, remote sensing, and ecological modelling. Key topics of interest include the impacts of climate change on biodiversity, the relationship between ecological niches and geographic distributions, speciation processes, and targeting field surveys to accelerate the discovery of unknown species and populations.
Richard has been Principal Investigator on research projects funded by the US National Science Foundation and by NASA, and his doctoral and postdoctoral research was funded through the European Commission. Richard is a Subject Editor for the journal Global Change Biology, Associate Editor for Journal of Biogeography, and Associate Editor for Frontiers of Biogeography, which is the scientific magazine of the International Biogeography Society. He serves on the steering committee for the IUCN Species Survival Commission Climate Change Specialist Group, is a contributing author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Working Group II, Fifth Assessment Report), and is a member of the UK Natural Environment Research Council’s Peer Review College.
Alongside his research and teaching, Richard engages in communicating biodiversity research to a general audience, including publishing a non-specialist book on the impact of climate change on biodiversity (Driven to Extinction, 2011).