Richard Ladle gave a talk at CIBIO, Azores

The ERA Chair Richard Ladle gave a talk entitled The Rise of Digital Conservation at the Spring Seminar of CIBIO in the University of the Azores, Ponta Delgada, Azores on 31 of May 2022. Richard also participated of the two days Spring Seminar meeting to learn a bit more about the research the Azores CIBIO team are currently doing.

Talk abstract: Conservation has famously been described as a ‘crisis discipline’ where decisions often have to be made on the basis of limited, incomplete or absent data. Such shortfalls are especially acute in the tropics which host the majority of the world’s biodiversity, but which contain regions where scientific capacity is extremely limited. At the same time anecdotal evidence suggests that human interactions with nature are in dramatic decline across the world with potentially negative effects for both human well-being and, more generally, support for nature conservation and the environmental agenda. In this seminar I describe how two emerging disciplines, ‘Conservation Culturomics’ and ‘iEcology’, are harnessing the enormous potential of big data to provide new insights into human-nature interactions and to map biodiversity dynamics through time and space. These approaches have enormous potential to support and complement traditional ecological and social surveys, helping to fill some of the major shortfalls in global biodiversity data.


Photos taken during the talk.


Some slides from the talk.