David Edwards
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About
Research Area
Our research focuses on quantifying the impacts of habitat change and wildlife trade on tropical biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Tropical forests harbour a hyperdiversity of species, many of which are threatened with extinction. Understanding how habitat loss and degradation, and overexploitation for trade impacts biodiversity is a core tenet of the research we do. So too is understanding how the global restoration agenda could bend the curve to recover biodiversity and ecosystem services. I am founding a Centre for Global Wood Security, a cross-disciplinary initiative to understand how to sustainably meet societies growing needs for timber, fuelwood, and carbon stocks, as well as forest biodiversity conservation, under a range of stressors including wildfire, climate change, competition for land with farming, and illegal exploitation.
We work on a range of taxa, including trees, orchids, birds and dung beetles, both in the field and using desk-based mapping and analysis. We work with environmental economists and land systems scientists to understand global-scale feedbacks of conservation actions, and NGOs and government agencies to inform policy uptake of our research. Fieldwork is a major component of my group’s research including in the Andes, sub-Saharan Africa, and Borneo.
Project Interests
I am keen to develop projects on the broad themes of tropical ecology and conservation. I would like to find new angles related to issues of global wood security and their links to biodiversity conservation and ecosystem functioning. I would also like to better understand the conservation of Andean orchids, given that the vast majority of species lack understanding of their distributions, conservation status, and pollination ecology, and that they face multiple stressors from deforestation, exploitation for trade, climate change, plus habitat restoration.