Tim Newbold (PhD 2009)

TIm completed his PhD, under the supervision of Tom Reader and Francis Gilbert, in 2009. He is now a postdoc at WCMC in Cambridge. Here is how he described his PhD work:

Research Interests

My research is concerned primarily with mapping and predicting the biodiversity of Egypt, using species distribution models. I use the resulting maps of predicted species richness to assess the effectiveness of Egypt's protected areas.  We are currently also collaborating with Stuart Ball at the JNCC, trying to predict the effect of climate change on British hoverfly species.

Egypt's BioMAP project, run by Francis Gilbert and Samy Zalat, has been collating records of Egyptian plant and animal species from museum records and from the literature. The database currently stands in excess of 500,000 records. However, the geographical coverage of these records is not complete. Species distribution models are poweful tools, used to generate maps of predicted probability of occurrence from a database of species sightings. The principal independent variables used in these models describe aspects of climate (temperature and precipitation), topography (altitude, slope and aspect) and land cover (vegetation types). I am investigating the role that interactions with other species (e.g. competition) play in shaping species distributions.

References

See group publications here.

Links

Personal Website

Email

A brief CV