Redpath CV
Keynote Presentations from the 5th ALTER-Net Summer School, Peyresq 5 - 14 September 2010
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Speaker: Steve Redpath s.redpath -at- abdn.ac.uk Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability, Aberdeen University, UK http://www.aces.ac.uk
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Title of the talk: Managing conservation conflicts (pdf: 4MB)
Biosketch
Since I was five, I have been passionate about ecology and conservation and I am extremely fortunate in having been able to work in these fields ever since. I undertook both my degree (1985) and PhD (1989) at Leeds University in northern England, and this was where I started working on raptors, exploring the controversial subject of the impact that hen harriers have on populations of red grouse. This theme has been woven into my academic career ever since. In 1990, I went to work with Ian Newton at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) at Monks Wood in southern England. Here, I temporarily became nocturnal as I started working on owls, quantifying the impact of habitat fragmentation on owls in farmland. However, the pull of the Scottish uplands was too strong and by 1992 I was back working on hen harriers – this time at Langholm in the Scottish Borders. At Langholm, I enjoyed five glorious years of field ecology, relatively unfettered by the binds of bureaucracy. In 1997, I moved to CEH Banchory in Aberdeenshire, where, as well as continuing my work on harriers, I developed experiments to examine the role of parasites and behaviour in driving population cycles in red grouse, and helped establish a long-term upland experiment examining the impact of grazing on biodiversity. In 2007, CEH was restructured and the Banchory site was very sadly shut down. As a result I moved to Aberdeen University where I currently hold a Chair in Conservation Science and am Director of the Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability. My work continues to focus on long-term and large-scale field systems, using experiments to tease out the impact of population processes and land use on individual behaviour, populations and communities. I am also increasingly interested in linking ecology with the social sciences to find sustainable solutions to conservation problems, and I continue to strive for a long-term, workable solution to the hen harrier-red grouse controversy. Over the years I have produced >90 peer-reviewed papers and am an editor of Animal Conservation.
