Dr Ken Norris

My current research interests span a range of individual, population, community and ecosystem approaches to understanding how biodiversity responds to environmental change. This work has included a long-term interest in basic and applied avian ecology, which currently involves using individual-based datasets from endangered birds in Mauritius as ‘model’ systems to explore environmental change impacts from individuals to populations. Recently, we have developed a novel approach for exploring the biodiversity impacts of agricultural change across a range of UK taxa (plants, insects, birds, mammals). We have recently used this to explore the potential impact of agri-environmental management on biodiversity, and extended it to other ecosystems (e.g. European forest birds). Finally, my work is increasingly focusing on the links between biodiversity, ecosystem function and ecosystem services, particularly through studies in tropical forest and agro-forestry ecosystems in Africa.

Going forwards, my work will be focused in two broad areas. First, improving our understanding of how biodiversity responds to environmental change by looking in particular at how the evolutionary ecology of individual organisms affects population and community dynamics. Second, improving our understanding of how biodiversity change affects ecosystem services and the values/benefits people derive from these services across a range of ecosystems – urban, agricultural, tropical forests and marine.