Aquatic Ecology & Evolution

Mitigating biodiversity loss in the face of climate change

About Me

I am a global change ecologist interested in climate change effects on biodiversity in the recent past and into the future. I am part of the Wyss Academy for Nature project ‘Stopping biodiversity loss in waterbodies despite climate change’ (https://www.wyssacademy.org/post/stopping-biodiversity-loss-in-waterbodies-despite-climate-change).

In this project, we seek to understand the shifting biodiversity of Switzerland’s freshwater ecosystems under climate change. My research quantifies the vulnerability of freshwater ecosystems to future scenarios of climate change and evaluates how current Anthropogenic stressors threaten the capacity for biodiversity to respond to climate change. This information will be used to identify biodiversity conservation areas using spatial prioritisation tools that will help guide restoration and revitalisations of Switzerland’s water bodies.

More broadly, I am interested in how climate-driven shifts in species distributions and abundances influence community-level biodiversity, ecosystem functions and the contributions of nature to people. I use ecological niche theory combined with macroecological modelling tools to explain the environmental constrains on species’ distribution and consider how these constraints may change in the future.

For more information on my research, publications and interests please visit my personal webpage

Selected Publications

Waldock, C., Stuart-Smith, R.D., Albouy, C., Cheung, W.W.L., Edgar, G.J., Mouillot, D., Tjiputra, J. and Pellissier, L. (2021), A quantitative review of abundance-based species distribution models. Ecography. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.05694

Antão, L.H., Bates, A.E., Blowes, S.A. et al. (2020) Temperature-related biodiversity change across temperate marine and terrestrial systems. Nature Ecology and Evolution 4, 927–933 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1185-7

Waldock, C., Stuart-Smith, R.D., Edgar, G.J., Bird, T.J. and Bates, A.E. (2019) The shape of abundance distributions across temperature gradients in reef fishes. Ecology Letters, 22: 685-696. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13222

Waldock, C., Dornelas, M., Amanda E Bates, A.E. (2018) Temperature-Driven Biodiversity Change: Disentangling Space and Time, BioScience, 68, 873–884. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biy096