Lluís Brotons

Associated PI (M)

PROGRAM / Conservation biology

Global change is a combination of rapid environmental changes at the global scale involving significant threats to human society and ecological systems. Understanding and predicting the impacts of the different components of global change the interactions between them on ecological communities is currently one of the major challenges to science. The approach taken to cover this need in terrestrial systems is based on the integration of different disciplines ranging from ecology, landscape and species distribution modeling to remote sensing science and applied conservation science. Unraveling the causes of past changes in biodiversity patterns under environmental change (land use changes, climate change, agricultural intensification and disturbance regimes such as fires) allows the critical and adequate calibration and development of models of future ecosystem response to further change under specific future scenarios of socioeconomic change. It is worth mentioning his contribution to the understanding and modelling of biodiversity responses to changing fire regimes. Such biodiversity modeling requires of good long term temporal data, and Dr. Brotons has been a leading force in designing and developing large scale monitoring and mapping projects in Spain and Europe. He has been member of the board of the European Bird Census Council (EBCC) for more than 10 years and member of the steering committee of the European Breeding Bird Atlas (EBBA2).

Dr. Brotons is a top scientist in Ecology and Evolution (#962 in the world and #27 in Spain), based on the D-index (Discipline H-index, 66 with a total of 18,067 citations) metric by Research.com (2022). He has published 350 articles and books chapters (245 in indexed journals), including five highly cited articles, and has conducted research in leading institutions in Spain, Finland, USA, Canada and France and has secured funding from various sources (including both national and EU international competitive calls) resulting involved in 45 competitive research projects, being the leading researcher in 26 of them (including both national and EU international competitive calls), mobilizing a total of over 3.5 million Euros in the last 10 years. In addition to his research, he has collaborated with private and public entities to develop new tools for landscape management and applied biodiversity conservation (30 knowledge transfer and feedback to society). He has also engaged in various activities aimed at disseminating scientific knowledge to the broader public, such as participating actively engaging in social networks (@ecolandlab), in outreach programs and delivering public lectures. He has been strongly interested in implementing science policy interfaces both at national and international level. In the later, he has been involved in the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) since its early stages (2012) and has been later appointed Coordinating Lead Author for the “Modeling impacts of drivers on biodiversity and ecosystem properties and processes’ included in the deliverable 3c of the initial IPBES working program (2014-2015) and Leading Author of the European and Central Asia IPBES assessment. He has also participated in the 1st Mediterranean Assessment Report by the MedECC group when he received the collective prize "North-South Prize 2020 of the Council of Europe”.