Read more from the New Scientist: Tree of bird life could solve Noah’s Ark problem    

How do we best preserve the world’s remaining biodiversity? That was the topic of a conference I attended last week at the Royal Society in London on ‘Phylogeny, extinction risk and conservation’.  The two-day conference included a range of interesting presentations on global to regional conservation efforts. Obviously the extinction story can be a depressing…

We have a new paper out at MEE. It is a guide on how to use Joint Species Distribution Models (JSDMs) originally known (to us) as Multivariate Probit models (MVP), a name which thankfully didn’t stick. Without delving into the details, this is a way to use species co-occurrence data when modelling species distributions. Why is…

Locating areas where species will likely persist in future climate changes has recently become a conservation priority. How do we find these areas? A good first step is to look for places that species persisted through past climate changes (often termed ‘refugia’). We think we may have identified mini or micro-refugia for trees on deep, protected…

We have a new paper out in Ecography. The aim was to link functional traits to environmental gradients. There are existing methods that do this, but they generally involve multiple steps. We created a hierarchical model that effectively joins a species distribution model with species trait values in one step. We were quite happy with the model because…