ATTEND ONLINE: The future of biodiversity in the Andes-Amazon. Miles Silman

Abstract: The eastern Andes and western Amazon are Earth’s highest biodiversity landscapes. Dynamism rules, with natural change on all time scales, from mountain building to climate change and landslides, and unnatural change due to deforestation, defaunation, anthropogenic climate change, and the intersection of corruption, narcotrafficking and organized crime with a sprawling global gold rush. This talk looks at the future of Andean and Amazonian biodiversity and what life is and isn’t resilient to, focusing on a 3800m elevation gradient extending from the high Andes to Amazonian lowlands in SE Peru, and on social and ecosystem destruction and recovery in the face of illegal gold mining.

Biography: Miles Silman holds the Sabin Chair in Conservation Biology at Wake Forest University. He is an ecologist and conservation scientist whose basic research interests are in community structure and ecosystem function, and particularly the roles of species interactions in structuring the world that we see and inhabit. Silman has been working in the Western Amazon and Andes of Peru for the last 34 years to study and protect the planet’s last best forests, combining large-scale forest inventory, remote sensing, and paleoecology to understand regional effects of climate change, as well as team-building to focus research on pressing conservation issues. He is the founding director of the Sabin Center for Environment and Sustainability and currently serves as board president at CINCIA, the Centro de Innovación Científica Amazónica.

The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Biodiversity Network are interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery/Biodiversity Network, or its researchers.