Southampton ecologist wins major grant to map global ecosystems services
Dr Felix Eigenbrod from the Centre for Biological Sciences is embarking on a five year project to map how human beings use and benefit from nature – ecosystem services. He has secured an European Research Council Starting Grant (SCALEFORES) worth more than a million pounds to examine how existing datasets from ecosystems around the world can be best used to understand such benefits. This includes factors such as agriculture, timber production, clean water, carbon storage etc.
“Humans have always depended on natural resources for survival, but on our increasingly crowded planet we need to manage our ecosystems to provide multiple benefits.” he explains. “In this project, I will develop and test new ways of using existing information to produce accurate pictures of the links between ecosystem services in previously unmapped areas.”
The grant is from a EU programme that encourages creative and innovative research. It will release Felix from 60 per cent of his university duties to lead the work. He will recruit two postdoctoral researchers and collaborate with Forest Research (the research agency of the Foresty Commission) and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, as well as academic partners in Europe and elsewhere during the lifespan of the project.
Related Staff Member
Dr Felix Eigenbrod BSc, MRes, DPhil
A landscape ecologist by training, I am broadly interested in quantifying the often complex interactions between biodiversity, society and ecosystem services, and at identifying the spatial and temporal scales at which tradeoffs and interactions occur. In my research I use GIS and different modelling techniques to develop novel methodologies for linking existing environmental, social and biological datasets to fully understand the processes underlying the wide range of ecosystem services used by humans, and how human impacts affect global distributions of species. My work is highly interdisciplinary, and I frequently collaborate with specialists in other fields, ranging from biophysical modellers (e.g. hydrologists and dynamic vegetation modellers) to economists and human geographers.
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