MrRhys Preston-Allen

My research combines biodiversity monitoring with large-scale modelling to ask big-picture questions: which species and ecosystems are most at risk, why some prove resilient where others do not, where environmental pressures bite hardest, and how that knowledge should shape where we intervene. I work across data types and scales, from autonomous sensors and field survey data to global open datasets and scenario models, and toward outputs that can inform management and policy.

My PhD asks how we can credibly verify that biodiversity is recovering in large-scale ecological restoration - a question central both to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework's restoration target and to the emerging biodiversity credit market, neither of which has a standardised, scalable, and scientifically robust way to answer it. In the Brazilian Amazon, I use passive acoustic monitoring, camera traps, and AI classifiers alongside satellite data to measure how bird and mammal communities reassemble after restoration. I then carry those recovery trajectories into biome-scale scenario models, projecting what restoration will deliver in the future.

Earlier work spans the macroecology of threats and extinction risk, including a global assessment of fully migratory birds' exposure to droughts and cyclones, and freshwater multiple-stressor ecology, where I led NERC-funded field and mesocosm experiments on chemical pollution and warming. I came to research from a career in environmental communications.

I am supervised by Prof. James Rosindell, in collaboration with Prof. Cristina Banks-Leite and the Community and Landscape Ecology (CaLE) Lab, as part of the Grantham Institute's Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet Doctoral Training Programme. My fieldwork is conducted in partnership with Mombak, and my scenario modelling is supported by a placement with the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. I am on the committee for the British Ecological Society's Macroecology Special Interest Group, and an active member of the Academia and Research Organisations group (A&R group) for the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).