Statistics Seminar - Emma Gardner & Claudia Acerini (UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology)
| Dates: | 11 November 2026 |
|---|
| Times: | 14:00 - 15:00 |
|---|
| What is it: | Seminar |
|---|
| Organiser: | Department of Mathematics |
|---|
| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
|---|
|
Title: Co-creating mechanistic models to increase understanding of species’ ecologies and support biodiversity-inclusive decision-making
Abstract: In the UK, efforts are being made to promote ecosystem restoration and nature recovery across all policy scales – from national and local government through to grassroots community action. New incentives to create and connect habitats are becoming available, but decision-makers often still lack the knowledge, tools and confidence to make biodiversity-inclusive landscape decisions. As a result, we have co-developed a family of mechanistic, process-based models (*4pop) that simulate landscape use by birds, bats, reptiles, amphibians and pollinators, to help gather, share and test understanding of species ecologies and predict how they might be affected by landscape changes.
Given landcover data, the models predict spatially-explicit relative abundance by simulating home-range foraging, reproduction, dispersal of offspring and mortality. The models are co-developed by researchers, conservation NGOs and volunteer surveyors, parameterised with a combination of literature data and expert opinion, and validated against observational datasets collected across Great Britain. They produce high resolution (10m) outputs at national extent, enabling both local and national decision-makers to explore species’ responses to landscape change using the same model.
We will outline the collaborative process of building these ‘community models’. Using our latest bat4pop model as a case study example, we will explain how observational datasets are used to calibrate and validate these mechanistic models, and how such work can provide evidence of the conservation challenges species face – in this case, demonstrating the limiting effects of light pollution on bat species abundance and distributions. We’ll conclude by showing some examples of the use of these models by decision-makers and share what this has taught us about the role such models can play in supporting real-world decision-making processes.
Speakers: Emma Gardner and Claudia Acerini are Quantitative Ecologists based at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, whose research focuses on ecological modelling of species responses to landscape change.
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Frank Adams 2
Alan Turing Building
Manchester
