Professor David Edwards

I hold the Professorship of Plant Ecology (2000) at the University of Cambridge and am the founding director of the Centre for Global Wood Security. Over the last two decades my research has primarily focused on understanding the responses of forest-based biodiversity and ecosystem services to global change, including selective logging, conversion to farmland, and restoration.

My research combines intensive field study, with remote sensing, global mapping, and land-use modelling, to tackle key questions in forest ecology, management, and conservation, with a focus on issues of global policy significance. I have worked extensively across tropical forest ecosystems, including the Andes, Amazon, West Africa, southern African miombo, Himalaya, Indochina, and insular South-east Asia, but also take a fully global-scale perspective in identifying threats to forestry.

I am particularly interested in understanding the most effective ways of managing timber production and restoration to enhance biodiversity protection and the sustainable delivery of associated ecosystem functions and services. Our recent work has revealed the threats posed to global timber supply from wildfire and competition with farming under climate change.