Zoology Department Seminar: Ecological networks reveal how changes in pollinator biodiversity cascade through agroecosystems to shape human nutrition and livelihoods

Our Departmental Seminars run weekly on Thursdays during term time. They cover recent research on a wide variety of topics from evolutionary genetics through behavioural ecology to ecology and natural history.  Please click here for a list of all of this term's seminars.

Everyone in Zoology is invited, and Part II undergraduate zoologists are particularly encouraged to attend. 

Speaker: Dr Thomas Timberlake, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, University of York

Abstract: 

Biodiversity underpins human health through the ecosystem processes that support food production, nutrition and livelihoods, yet these connections can be difficult to trace. 

In this talk, I will explore how ecological networks can be used to follow these links from wild species and their interactions, through crops and food systems, to individual people. Drawing on research with smallholder farming communities in western Nepal, I will focus on the role of insect pollinators in supporting people’s nutritional health and household income, showing how ongoing pollinator declines are expected to exacerbate poverty and malnutrition in vulnerable communities. 

I will also explore the other side of this relationship: how farming families can improve their livelihoods and nutrition by managing and restoring pollination services, drawing on some of the exciting work being led by communities in Nepal. More broadly, the talk will consider how changes in biodiversity can ripple through food systems to affect human nutrition across the world.