Watt CV

Keynote Presentations from the 4th ALTER-Net Summer School, Peyresq 5 - 17 September 2009

Title of the talk: Biodiversity, ecosystems, processes, functions, services, benefits, threats and responses... (pdf: 9MB)

Biosketch

I work for the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH)  at Edinburgh and lead research in CEH’s Biodiversity and Water Programmes. I am also the Deputy Director of CEH’s Biodiversity Programme.

My own research largely focuses on science underpinning the conservation of biodiversity. I am particularly interested in developing methods for monitoring biodiversity (including indicators), quantifying the impact of land use change on biodiversity (e.g. forest clearance, agricultural intensification), methods for assessing ecosystem services, alien invasive species, policies for the conservation sustainable use of biodiversity, and conflicts between the conservation of biodiversity and human activities.

I have been involved in several European (EU-funded) projects on biodiversity, including ALTER-Net (A Long-Term Biodiversity, Ecosystem and Awareness Research Network), Rubicode (Rationalising biodiversity conservation in dynamic ecosystems), Biostrat (Developing the EU Biodiversity Research Strategy), BEAR (an FP4 project on forest biodiversity indicators), BioAssess (an FP5 project on biodiversity indicators and the impact of land use change on biodiversity in Europe), and the BIOFORUM project, another FP5 project which provided a forum for scientists and stakeholders concerned about conflicts between the conservation of biodiversity and human activities. I was the coordinator of the last two projects and am currently the deputy coordinator of ALTER-Net.

I am involved in science-policy development at a range of scales including recently working with a range of stakeholders to develop a set of biodiversity indicators for Scotland. I am a member of the UK Biodiversity Research Advisory Group, the European Platform for Biodiversity Research Strategy (EPBRS) and DG Environment’s Biodiversity Expert Group. I have also worked on the Convention of Biological Diversity’s expert groups on biodiversity and climate change. I previously worked on biodiversity in tropical forests, particularly in Cameroon, Costa Rica and Sumatra. This included working with specialists on a range of taxa to assess the impact of land use change on biodiversity. I also have a research interest in the population dynamics of forest pests such as the pine beauty moth and the mahogany shoot borer and am the senior editor of Agricultural and Forest Entomology.