Lynn Dicks

Wildlife conservation in agricultural landscapes, with emphasis on farming system transitions and ecosystem services provided by mobile arthropods.

 

Research Area

Our research asks one of the most urgent questions on the planet: how will we continue feeding humanity without catastrophic loss of biodiversity, as climate change accelerates? Current agricultural methods, especially high-yielding, chemically-intensive systems that remain a focus of economic development in many countries, degrade the ecosystems on which they depend and are not resilient to climate change. Soils are eroded and become less fertile, water is polluted, crops are vulnerable to disease and populations of pollinators and other functionally important invertebrates decline under these systems. Yet many current approaches to biodiversity-friendly agriculture risk enhancing the amount of land used for agriculture, expanding further into natural habitats and driving even more species extinctions.  The Agroecology group is searching for solutions. We study emerging farming systems such as regenerative agriculture, challenging hype and testing environmental and economic outcomes on the ground. We use large-scale experiments involving real commercial farms, operating viable businesses. We work in partnership with farmers, looking at what happens to biodiversity, especially insects and birds, and how productive and economically profitable the farming systems are. We work with environmental NGOs, including the Cool Farm Alliance, the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, the RSPB and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust.

 

Project Interests

We have networks of arable or mixed farms in three landscapes in the UK, where we are studying the effects of a transition to regenerative agriculture. I am interested in projects looking closely at ecosystem service provision – pollination, pest regulation, water quality - in these landscapes. How do ecosystem service providers use the available habitats? How do they respond to farm management, including the ecotoxicity of chemicals and other contaminants? Methods can include DNA sequencing, AI-driven analysis of acoustic and image data, or quantitative or qualitative interviews with land managers. We also have projects in India, Brazil, Chile and China.