Laura Graham

Laura Graham is a computational landscape ecologist and IIASA-NERC Research Fellow in the Biodiversity, Ecology, and Conservation (BEC) Research Group. Her primary research aim is to understand how the spatial structure of landscapes can help reduce trade-offs between competing needs of biodiversity conservation and human wellbeing.

Her research delves into the current global biodiversity crisis, which sees many species in decline and/or at risk of extinction. The recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services shows that 25% of species are threatened. How landscapes are managed is a key driver of this. While there is a reasonable understanding of the effect of habitat amount, understanding of the effect of how this is spatially arranged is still being debated and the influence not well understood. Graham will provide a systematic and process-based understanding of the independent and combined effects of landscape composition and configuration.

As part of her IIASA-NERC funded fellowship, Graham will provide a step-change in the understanding of how disparate research areas can be unified considering landscape structure, and provide answers to key fundamental and applied questions about the impacts of landscape structure on biodiversity, which have hitherto been intractable.

The research will bring together data synthesis, meta-analysis and systems modeling approaches to gain a systematic understanding of the effects of landscape structure on biodiversity, as well as develop new modeling approaches that allow the exploration of future scenarios.

Read more about Graham's research here: https://laurajanegraham.github.io.


Last update: 12 MAY 2021