Alistair Auffret

I mostly teach landscape ecology and field botany for undergraduate students. At the post-graduate level, I develop and lead courses in using the R environment to handle data and perform GIS analyses.

I'm interested in the role of humans in determining changes in biodiversity and distributions over time. In particular, I want to know changes in landscape and climate during the past century have shaped patterns of biodiversity today. Using historical and present-day maps and species inventories, I look at the changes in biodiversity that have already happened in response to environmental change, with the hope that that knowledge can be used to conserve biodiversity now and in the future.

I am also very interested in the dispersal of plant species in time and space, and how this is driven directly and indirectly by humans through management and landscape structure. Seeds can move in any number of ways related to human activity, while dormancy in the seed bank can act to buffer biodiversity during times of unsuitable conditions. I think that understanding how species move in time and space will help us to understand their responses to environmental pressures and conservation actions.