Keynote Speakers
主旨演讲嘉宾
Yadvinder Malhi
Yadvinder Malhi is Professor of Ecosystem Science at the University of Oxford and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery. For much of his career, he has researched the ecosystem ecology of tropical forests, starting with Amazonia and the Andes, and then expanding research across African and Asian tropical forests in subsequent decades. More recently, he has also worked in non-forest ecosystems, including tropical savannas and atoll islands, and Arctic tundra. He founded the GEM (Global Ecosystems Monitoring) network of tropical forest monitoring studies, and more recent work has focused on using ecosystem energetics to bring plants and animals into a single, multitrophic understanding. He also has a broader interest in exploring the potential for effective and socially just large-scale restoration of ecosystems. He is firmly committed to improving international equity in the practice of ecology. He is Past-President of the British Ecological Society and the ATBC, a Trustee of the Natural History Museum of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Captured sunshine: an energetic view of tropical terrestrial ecosystems
The biosphere was first described as “a planetary membrane for capturing, storing and transforming solar energy” by Vernadsky in the early 20th century. Every living organism is united, and can be compared, by the cascade of captured sunshine that powers it. But beyond powerful imagery, can an energetic approach to ecosystems yield a practical contribution to understanding how increasing human pressure is altering ecological function, and be a tool for assessing the effectiveness of nature recovery?
This talk explores this potential with a focus on plants, birds, and mammals, the best-documented taxonomic groups. I first describe field studies of tropical forest energetics in forests in Borneo and Amazonia, exploring the differences in plant and vertebrate energetics between the two ecosystems. I then explore the difference in energetics between old-growth and logged forests, examining how plant functional traits end up shaping vertebrate communities.
Finally, I explore how energetic approaches can be applied at scale, looking at the patterns and changes in bird and mammal communities across sub-Saharan Africa.
I conclude by proposing a novel ecological metric, vibrancy, that captures the magnitude and spread of energy flow through any specific taxonomic or functional group. I explore its potential, as well as limitations. I call for a revival of interest in energetics approaches as a tool to understand tropical ecosystems on a changing planet. An energetic approach to understanding life on Earth can yield some surprising and provocative insights into our changing biosphere.