DERI Seminar with Dr Ian McFadden

When: Thursday, March 14, 2024, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Where: Zoom

Speaker: Dr Ian McFadden,Lecturer in Computational Ecology at QM

Title: Expanding local ecology to the global scale with artificial intelligence
Zoom link: https://qmul-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81148100921
Abstract:
How many of Earth's flowers were visited by pollinators in the time it took you to read this sentence? How many fruits were eaten, and by which animals? Though we may never answer these questions, we are now closer than ever due to ongoing revolutions in big data integration, machine learning, computer vision and remote sensing, to name a few. These revolutions have expanded the focus of global ecology and biogeography beyond analyzing numbers and types of species into the realm of local community ecology- which asks how interactions shape the diversity, coexistence and resilience of co-occuring species. I will share a brief history of my research on ecological interactions, starting at the local scale in tropical forests and expanding upwards to the global scale. Looking forward, I will discuss how computer vision and machine learning might be used to build global maps of species interactions, and how such maps could be useful for both ecologists and conservation biologists. 

Bio:
Dr. Ian McFadden recently joined the Department of Biology at Queen Mary as a Lecturer in Computational Ecology. Previously he was a fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Amsterdam, a postdoctoral researcher in the ETH Domain (WSL Birmensdorf and ETH Zürich) in Zürich, and received his PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is interested in problems and solutions at the intersection of global change biology, ecology and artificial intelligence.