Macroecological Modelling Team
CSIRO’s Macroecological Modelling Team develops and applies novel macroecological approaches to biodiversity modelling and conservation assessment. This research aims to improve our understanding of current patterns in biodiversity, and our capacity to project future outcomes for biodiversity under scenarios of global change and management, thereby enabling assessment of alternative approaches for retaining biodiversity into the future. Importantly, the research of our group focuses primarily on collective properties of biodiversity (e.g. compositional turnover and richness) at a whole-community or whole-ecosystem level, rather than on individual species.
The Macroecological Modelling Team focuses on a number of research topics that contribute to improved biodiversity modelling and conservation assessment:
New approaches to modelling biodiversity pattern – developing new macroecological modelling techniques linking biological observations with remote environmental mapping to describe current and future patterns in biodiversity.
New approaches to projecting future biodiversity change – incorporating a range of important ecological processes, such as genetic adaptation, dispersal, and community assembly, into macroecological modelling of biodiversity persistence under global change.
Improving spatial habitat and environmental data – developing and applying new techniques for deriving high-resolution spatial layers and projections of habitat condition and abiotic environmental variables.
Considering interactions with ecosystem function – exploring and modelling potential interactions between biodiversity composition and ecosystem functioning at macroecological spatial and temporal scales.
Incorporating advances in modelling into policy evaluation, planning and management – developing new approaches to integrating our modelling techniques into a wide range of real-world assessment and decision-making frameworks.
