Associate Professor Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences Asia2@tropicalbio.rog;

Alice is an Associate Professor and leads the Landscape Ecology group at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences. She has worked extensively across the Tropics, and previously held positions in Thailand, Australia, Costa Rica, and the UK before moving to China. She also holds Honorary positions at the Universities of Bangor and Groningen, a guest position at IIASA and a position at the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation. She Chairs the ATBC’s Asia-Pacific Chapter and chairs the Young Professionals Network for the IUCN’s commission for Ecosystem management. In addition she holds board positions for numerous International conservation and scientific societies and part of CCICED’s post-2020 framework for the CBD. In addition she is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Animal Ecology, and an editor for Heliyon, Checklist, Ecosystem Health and Sustainability, Frontiers in Forest Science, Diversity and distributions and Ecotropica. Alice is the author of around 46 papers, with a further 16 currently in review.

Alice’s work focuses on patterns of biodiversity and drivers of biodiversity change, at various spatiotemporal scales in order to develop pro-active management strategies that aim to mitigate the impacts of human activities on biodiversity. Her research spans from biogeographic research to conservation prioritization and management, and the development of tools for conservation biodiversity monitoring and assessment.

She currently also has projects on mapping karst biodiversity and centres of endemism, and developing priorities for regional conservation for Southeast Asia. Her work has included extended reviews on the threats to Southeast Asian biodiversity, mapping conservation priorities, and threats for the Southeast Asian region and exploring the impacts of infrastructural development on biodiversity. In addition we have a number of projects on ecosystem services, which range from the implementation of China’s ecological Redline Policy, to understanding pollination networks, and how the structure of these networks vary with distance from intact habitat, with a special focus on bats and their role in these networks. She also explores the limitations of different datasets, and approaches to better integrate data to develop implementable science based solutions for policy and management.

All our work seeks to better understand natural systems, and to use that information to develop priorities for conservation and management, this also includes the development of tools such as using bat bioacoustics to rapidly inventory diversity and develop standard methods for surveys to mitigate the impact of development on biodiversity.

Alice’s work aims to bridge the gap between scientific research and implementation, in addition to academic research, and extensive capacity building across the global tropics Alice also attends intergovernmental meetings and works across society to translate conservation science into something implementable and practicable, and to help develop and disseminate evidence-based policy and management approaches.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alice_Hughes2