Associate Professor Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences Asia2@tropicalbio.rog; achughes@xtbg.ac.cn
I am an Associate Professor and lead the Landscape Ecology group at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences. I have worked extensively across the Tropics, and previously held positions in Thailand, Australia, Costa Rica, and the UK before moving to China. I also hold Honorary positions at the Universities of Bangor and Groningen and a position at the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, and am a “key person” for Alert-Conservation. I am currently Chair of the ATBC’s Asia-Pacific Chapter and a member of the ATBC Council. In addition I hold board positions for the Asian section for the Society of Conservation Biology, the International Network of Next generation ecologists, and the European Tropical Ecology Society, and a number of others. I am also leader of the Young professionals network for the IUCN’s commission on ecosystem management, and a Steering committee member for Coalition Wild. In addition I am an Associate Editor for the Journal of Animal Ecology, and an editor for Heliyon, Checklist, Ecosystem Health and Sustainability and Ecotropica. I have given around 60 presentations at international conferences or invited presentations in universities and research organisations and am an author of 38 papers. I have also run 35 training workshops and organized a further 15 in addition to 5 fieldcourses. In addition I have attended 15 international workshops and organized 9 international conferences.
My work focuses on patterns of biodiversity and drivers of biodiversity change, at various spatiotemporal scales in order to develop pro-active management strategies that aim to mitigate the impacts of human activities on biodiversity. My research spans from biogeographic research to conservation prioritization and management, with a special focus on critical ecosystems including forest and karst.
I currently also have projects on mapping karst biodiversity and centres of endemism, and developing priorities for regional conservation for Southeast Asia, and recently brought out an extended review and synthesis on the threats to Southeast Asian biodiversity, and another manuscript on mapping conservation priorities for the Southeast Asian region. I also have a number of papers under review, including exploring migration through the use of modeling combined with other methods. Furthermore I am heavily involved with Conservation Internationals SPARC project in Asia, which aims to understand the impacts of climate change on the regions biodiversity. In addition we have a number of projects on ecosystem services, which range from the implementation of China’s ecological Redline Policy, to understanding pollination networks, and how the structure of these networks vary with distance from intact habitat, with a special focus on bats and their role in these networks.
All our work seeks to better understand natural systems, and to use that information to develop priorities for conservation and management, this also includes the development of tools such as using bat bioacoustics to rapidly inventory diversity and develop standard methods for surveys to mitigate the impact of development on biodiversity.
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Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden
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