Assoc. Professor Rebecca Senior

I am a conservation biologist trying to find pragmatic solutions to the global biodiversity crisis. Given that most of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity is found in forests, much of my research is focused there.

Forests are an excellent example of what can happen when environmental change is assessed through a myopic, anthropocentric lens. Our understanding of climate change impacts to date is largely founded on coarse and distal climate layers that are woefully unrepresentative of forest microclimates. Forests provide shade and buffer wind, they evapotranspire and the trees decay into deadwood and leaf litter. Forests are also vertically complex – it is not just the canopy that matters, but the many layers of vegetation beneath the canopy, and the three-dimensional packing of vegetation into and onto other vegetation. It follows that anything that disrupts this complex, multifaceted vegetation structure likely impacts the forest microclimate. Thus, our understanding of both land-use change and climate change is incomplete without considering climate at ecologically relevant scales.

At larger spatial scales, I am interested in spatial planning of forest landscapes to enhance their resilience to environmental change. My early work on forests focused on tropical rainforest landscapes. More recently, my research group has been assessing how regeneration through rewilding influences 3D vegetation structure, microclimate, and habitat connectivity. We are also exploring methods to guide the restoration and conservation of temperate rainforests in the UK and western Europe, with direct relevance to nature markets such as carbon credits and biodiversity net gain.

Personal website: https://rasenior.rbind.io/