BOC 15.2.23 - Endangered Birds of Mauritius: how has two decades of science helped? By Ken Norris

This is a recording of our annual joint lecture with the University of Reading. In it, Ken focuses on improving our understanding of how biodiversity responds to environmental change by looking in particular at how the evolutionary ecology of individual organisms affects population and community dynamics and secondly, improving our understanding of how biodiversity change affects ecosystem services and the values/benefits people derive from these services across a range of ecosystems – urban, agricultural, tropical forests and marine.

Ken did his PhD at Oxford, joined Reading University in 2005, becoming a research professor in the Centre for Agri-Environmental Research. In 2014 he left to become the Director of Science at ZSL (Zoological Society of London), then moved to the Natural History Museum (NHM) as Head of Life Sciences in 2020, becoming its Deputy Director in April 2022.

His current research interests span a range of individual, population, community and ecosystem approaches to understanding how biodiversity responds to environmental change. This work has included a long-term interest in basic and applied avian ecology, which currently involves using individual-based datasets from endangered birds in Mauritius as ‘model’ systems to explore environmental change impacts from individuals to populations. His work is increasingly focusing on the links between biodiversity, ecosystem function and ecosystem services, particularly through studies in tropical forest and agro-forestry ecosystems in Africa.