In December last year, hundreds of researchers from around the world gathered once again for the BES Annual Meeting, this time based in Liverpool. The conference was another great success for the Society, providing a platform for scientists to share their research, engage with the society’s networks and Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and connect with likeminded individuals. As we move into a new year of research and upcoming conferences, let’s recap the 2024 meeting by highlighting its inspiring plenary talks.

The Georgina Mace Lecture- Nathalie Seddon

On the first official day of talks, attendees were treated to a presentation by Dr Nathalie Seddon, Professor of Biodiversity and Founding Director of the Nature-based Solutions (NbS) Initiative for the Department of Biology at Oxford University. This lecture was dedicated to the late Georgina Mace, a trailblazer in conservation and ecology who was key in developing the IUCN Red List for threatened species.

Professor Seddon discussed the frameworks for valuing nature before introducing the idea of “nature as culture”, which is key to the NbS concept. There has been somewhat of a recent trend of NbS being misunderstood in legislation, often reduced to afforestation and other carbon offset schemes. In this talk, Seddon described the potential of NbS to act as a “Trojan horse” which would give ecologists a seat at the table of more major policy debates. With this access, we can more effectively advocate moving away from our current extractive approach to nature. As Professor Seddon remarked, “the current economic system is actively investing in its own demise”. Without rapid decarbonization, we cannot hope to curb biodiversity loss and climate change, and NbS cannot live up to its potential to transform the system.

But there have been promising developments. Seddon talked about how forging more radical collaborations could help to spread the message of conservation to a wider audience, describing the potential of other forms of media, like art, for raising awareness of conservation issues. She also emphasized the importance of enabling the full and effective participation of Indigenous communities, as was demonstrated at COP16, as a key step towards shifting our worldview in a more eco-centric direction.

The BES Lecture- Lucy Waruingi

On Thursday, conference-goers attended the second plenary talk given by Lucy Waruingi. She is the Executive Director of the African Conservation Centre (ACC), a Kenyan-based NGO that has been working in the East African savannahs for over 30 years.

Kenya is an incredible reservoir of biodiversity, home to over 150 mammal species. In this talk, Waruingi highlighted the East African borderlands in particular as being critical both for the economy and biodiversity. These areas are key for wildlife dispersal, which often spans beyond the range of protected areas. But they are also vital to nomadic pastoralists, which therefore presents a risk for human-wildlife conflict.

Waruingi started the Borderlands Conservation Initiative (BCI) to identify data gaps in these regions and target the areas of highest risk for conflict with wildlife. This was done in the hope that Kenya can create a collective, national strategy for future conservation.

And the outcome of this initiative was significant. In 2014, Waruingi and several of her colleagues coordinated the development of Kenya’s first biodiversity atlas, which collated all the data that was available and described Kenya’s unique ecosystems in more detail than ever before. Waruingi has also helped to establish conservancies that cover a further 11% of Kenya’s protected areas, mitigating the loss of wildlife corridors. These areas are managed by dedicated volunteers, involving the community in local conservation and providing them with a share of tourism profits. This scheme has even prompted President William Ruto to approve the transfer of control of Amboseli National Park to the Kajiado County Government, which could further boost the Maa community’s access to tourism and conservation resources.

Waruingi’s work with the ACC has attempted to build institutions from the bottom-up, focusing on community engagement and projects that can benefit both people and wildlife. To illustrate this point, she described a traditional “second cow mentality” that exists in Kenya, where people often view wildlife like second livestock in order to coexist peacefully. Although some policies may have estranged this relationship, Waruingi’s work is proof that we can rebuild this connection and produce benefits for both parties.

12 Months in Ecology Lecture- Rob Fish

On the final day of the conference, the schedule was jam-packed with the final two plenary talks. The first of these was given by Rob Fish, Professor of Environmental Sustainability at Imperial College London.

Professor Fish described himself as a social scientist by training and accordingly began his talk by highlighting the “social power” of words. He used as an example the BES journal “People and Nature”, for which he is a lead editor, arguing that the publication would be better thought of as “People in Nature”. Such a reframing would emphasise that mankind is just as much a part of nature as any of our wild ancestors. This is important, as Fish believes we are living in a “crisis of values” in modern times, specifically a decline in the relational value of nature. The more we can adopt an eco-centric worldview, the more we should begin to place higher value on our interactions with nature, as their benefits to our mental health and wellbeing are undeniable.

To emphasise this point, Professor Fish described a recent campaign against the felling of the so-called “Darwin Oak”, a 550-year-old tree that may have once sheltered Charles Darwin, as he regularly walked along the pathways in the area. Over 100,000 people signed a petition for the Shropshire Council to rethink their plans, demonstrating the immense power that nature of high relational value can have. Fish countered that although this case is inspiring, we should be able to find value in nature irrespective of which famous person may or may not have sat in its shade, and that nature has inherent worth regardless of which relational or financial values we place on it. Rather, the point of talking about these different values is to help engage a wider audience that may otherwise have little motivation to care about nature, as this will undoubtedly be key in producing the positive conservation outcomes that we need to curb biodiversity loss.

Professor Fish closed by highlighting the role that art and poetry can play in communicating the value of nature, stating the need to “marry information and meaning”. It is clear we are living in a time of crisis with regards to biodiversity and the climate, but perhaps it is the urgency that comes with these crises that will help us to start valuing nature properly.

Tansley Lecture- Ana Carnaval

The final plenary of the BES Annual Meeting was delivered by Ana Carnaval, who was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and is now a Professor in the Biology Department at the City College of New York.

Professor Carnaval shared some insights from her recent research in biogeography, describing how we can incorporate ecological thinking into analyses of intraspecific variation. She demonstrated with her recent work how adding these parameters to simulations of future spatial distribution of genetic diversity under climate change can produce major differences in results. For two species of Anolis lizard in the Atlantic Forest, considering variation in body size and dispersal ability in the model produced very different trajectories for each species. Both species were predicted to shift southwards, but these predictions are sensitive to body size, such that larger-bodied species were predicted to shift further.

Professor Carnaval questioned whether this information could be used to get biogeographers more involved in conservation, predicting its future directions using knowledge from ecologists. To explore this further, she discussed another example of her work where the aim was to see if ecology could be integrated into models of gene flow. Carnaval and her colleagues found that in the absence of genetic data for a species of passerine, incorporating ecological trait data improved models of genetic breaks (or the turnover from one lineage to another), as these models had significantly higher R-squared values than those using genetic data alone.

Professor Carnaval was confident in her research as proof that more collaboration between ecologists and biogeographers is possible, and in many cases can lead to exciting new methodologies that challenge old principles. From the perspective of the Journal of Animal Ecology, these goals clearly align with its aims and scope.  

Closing Remarks

In summary, the 2024 BES Annual Meeting was another valuable opportunity for scientists to share their research, and its plenary talks showed great cohesion in presenting a message for ecologists to take into the new year. Speakers urged us to forge more radical collaborations, explore new ways of sharing our research, and encourage people around the world to start viewing themselves as being part of nature, not separate from it. Most importantly, the speakers showed optimism that, as we count down to the next annual meeting, we will make progress towards achieving these goals.