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Francis Gilbert

Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences

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Biography

BA(Hons), St John's College, Cambridge 1978, PhD, St John's College, Cambridge 1981, Harkness Fellow 1982-3, Research Fellow, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge 1982-4, Lecturer (1984), Senior Lecturer (1996), University of Nottingham, Leverhulme Fellowship (1998)

Research Summary

I study the evolution of ecological and behavioural attributes of organisms, mainly in the field. I am particularly interested in the evolution of life histories and mimicry in insects, coevolution… read more

Selected Publications

Current Research

I study the evolution of ecological and behavioural attributes of organisms, mainly in the field. I am particularly interested in the evolution of life histories and mimicry in insects, coevolution between plants and insects (especially in pollination), and in the importance of habitat fragmentation to populations and conservation.

Fragmentation effects

I am interested in the determinants of biodiversity, especially in relation to habitat fragmentation, and in the roles of competition, predation, and food web design in the structuring of communities. I am particularly interested in the equilibrium theory of island biogeography, and its single-species equivalent, metapopulation theory, and in testing predictions these theories make about the effects of habitat fragmentation, vitally important to effective nature conservation. To do this, I use moss-patch mini-ecosystems for experimental field-based manipulations. Field mini-ecosystem approaches provide extremely powerful techniques for investigating ecosystem dynamics experimentally.

Using the moss system, I and my colleagues tested whether corridors between isolated patches slow down the rate of extinction caused by habitat fragmentation; tested experimentally the cause of the relationship between abundance and distribution; and further explored the effects of fragmentation and corridors. In a NERC-funded project, we are currently testing whether the loss of microarthropod species following fragmentation has detectable consequences on ecosystem function (with Philip Staddon, Peter Crittenden & Andy Gonzalez).

Conservation in Egypt

With my Egyptian partner Professor Zalat, I coordinate an international multidisciplinary team of colleagues working in the Protectorate. We have initiated and carried out projects on biodiversity mapping, grazing, population dynamics of spiny mice, butterfly metapopulations, insect-plant interactions, ecological chemistry, plant population genetic structure, small mammal parasite communities, the diversity of ground beetles, spider diversity, the impact of introduced honeybees on native wild bees, the value of Bedouin gardens as refuges in the landscape, Bedouin ethnobotany, Bedouin environmental education, and the social anthropology of the South Sinai Bedouin.

Fundamental to such efforts are biodiversity studies: we have put in place a systematic process of recording and mapping the biodiversity of the area, concentrating on the plants and their associated insects. From 2005-7 I was on sabbatical in Egypt helping my colleague Samy Zalat to run a $1m-project called BioMAP, funded by Italian Debt-Swap money, aimed at improving biodiversity mapping, monitoring, research and assessment in all the Protected Areas of Egypt. This project has created a National Biodiversity Database of all taxonomic groups for the whole of Egypt, and put in place a web-delivered GIS-mapping method of communicating the results to everyone.

The wadis within the great volcanic Ring Dyke around St Katherine constitute a set of habitats semi-isolated by the steep mountains. The more we study this system, the more distinct and unique each wadi appears. Clearly the gradual drying of the Sahara over the last 10,000 years has marooned an entire community of animals and plants on the high mountains here, and there are many genetically distinct species and populations. Each drainage system and each wadi appears to contain a unique community of animals and plants, and many populations appear to have evolved semi-independently (as assessed by genetic differentiation. Wadi topography forms a system of interconnected, yet evolutionarily semi-independent communities that is very interesting academically, and very important from a conservation standpoint. We are currently testing for the existence of micro-coevolution

School of Biology

University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

telephone: +44 (0)115 9513300 (Undergraduate Enquiries)
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email: biology@nottingham.ac.uk