Prof Barend Erasmus
South Africa
University of the Witwatersrand
Global Change and Sustainability Research Institute
Email meWork and Research
I have a keen interest in the effects of global change on various aspects of biodiversity (structure, function and composition) and how these impacts translate to system level responses at different scales of observation. I cannot tease apart the impacts of global change from background variation without understanding the behaviour of the system under different conditions, and therefore I look for links between fine-scale ecological processes and broad-scale patterns. Satellite image archives are a useful record of past environmental change. The challenge is to derive ecologically meaningful data from these images, and to interpret these changes in the context of other long-term data such as temperature and rainfall.
Fields Of Expertise
Biodiversity
Global Change Effects