News & Stories

From Greening to Wellbeing

Researcher Wendee Zhang presented her research at a recent Healthy Ecosystems Restoration in Oxfordshire (HERO) meeting this week, she discusses spatial and social-economic disparities in school outdoor greenness and the impact on mental wellbeing and school attendance in children and adolescents, you can watch it here now.

Linnean Medal 2025 awarded to wildlife biologist Professor David Macdonald

Professor David Macdonald CBE Professor David Macdonald, who founded the Department of Biology’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), has been awarded the Linnean Medal for long-standing and significant contributions to natural sciences. Through almost 40 years of wildlife research at WildCRU, David has contributed extensively to studies of a wide range of species including foxes, […]

FIELDWORK RESEARCH ASSISTANTS WITH THE DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF...

We are recruiting up to three short-term research assistants this spring/summer to assist with biodiversity data collection near Oxford. Fieldwork assistants will join a small team surveying insects, plants, mammals and birds at Begbroke, north of Oxford, where the University of Oxford is planning a major infrastructure project. We’re looking for people with fieldwork experience, […]

Local volunteering opportunity

As climate change threatens cocoa production, why new efforts are...

This Valentine’s Day, millions of pounds worth of chocolate were exchanged as gifts, but researchers have found climate change and biodiversity loss threaten future global supplies of this treat. A new study led by the University of Oxford has found that cocoa production—the key ingredient in chocolate—is at risk due to climate change and low […]

OPEN Fellowship awarded to investigate how risk impacts high-integrity carbon...

Caitlin Hafferty, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Environmental Change Institute, has recently been awarded an Oxford Policy Engagement Network (OPEN) Fellowship to explore the role of risk and uncertainty in shaping high-integrity nature markets in the UK. The project – conducted in partnership with the Green Finance and Capability Team at the Department for Energy Security […]

Oxford Researcher Wins Prestigious Award for Work on Nature-Based Climate...

We are delighted to announce that Dr Youngho (Young) Kim, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Environmental Economics, has been awarded the Wallace E. Oates Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2024 by the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE). This prestigious award recognises Dr Kim’s outstanding contribution to the field through his doctoral research at […]

Featuring on the Biodiversity Network website

If you are a member of staff, visiting researcher or a student at the University of Oxford, and you would like to feature your profile, or that of your research group on this website, please give us a few details and we’ll do the rest. To add your profile to the website click here To […]

Biodiversity Network Coffee (and talk) mornings

13th March:  Klara Kaleb – Natural Language Processing for Nature-based Solutions Accessing high-quality evidence for nature-based solutions (NbS) is challenging due to the vast, fragmented scientific literature. Manual systematic reviews are slow and resource-intensive, often leading to suboptimal environmental decisions. Advances in transformer-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) offer new opportunities to automate evidence synthesis and […]

Beyond the Sensor: Building Blocks for Equitable Nature Recovery

Dr Eric Mensah Kumeh Remote sensing has been around for almost 150 years, with the earliest forms of remote sensing dating back to the 1800s. The first aerial photographs were taken in 1858 by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, also known as Nadar, using a hot air balloon. Remote sensing is important because it provides a way to […]

Unpacking the politics of Nature-based Solutions governance: Making space for...

A new open access paper – ‘Unpacking the politics of Nature-based Solutions governance: Making space for transformative change‘ explains that while Nature Based Solutions (NbS) have huge potential to tackle biodiversity loss, climate change, and human well-being, dominant governance approaches can undermine the transformative change we need. NbS have received significant attention worldwide for their […]

Cop29: Indigenous communities still being sold short as the world...

dee karen/Shutterstock Stephen Lezak, University of Oxford and Bea Addis, Washington University in St. Louis As the annual UN climate conference, Cop29, draws to a close, negotiators, civil society observers and activists are staying up late, poring over draft texts that will determine how the international community addresses climate change for years to come. Central […]