YADVINDER MALHI
YADVINDER MALHI
About Me
My work focuses on enhancing biodiversity, strengthening ecological resilience, and contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation.
It brings together fundamental ecosystem science and applied research to inform conservation and policy.
My research explores how the biosphere functions and how ecosystems respond to global environmental change, including climate change. I have a particular focus on tropical forests, but my work also extends across savannas, temperate systems, marine environments and Arctic ecosystems.
A central theme is understanding how biodiversity, ecosystem structure and ecological processes shape the resilience and functioning of the natural world.
Ecosystem function, global change and biodiversity
I am founding Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, a multidisciplinary initiative that brings together ecological, social, cultural, policy and financial perspectives to understand how nature recovery can be delivered at scale.
My recent work also develops approaches using ecological energetics as mechanistic indicators of ecosystem health, applying classic ecological theory to contemporary challenges in biodiversity, restoration and conservation.
Science for restoration, resilience and ecological health
My work is grounded in extensive field programmes across tropical forests and savannas in Asia, Africa, the Amazon and the Andes.
I founded the Global Ecosystems Monitoring network, known as GEM, which supports intensive field plots that generate high-resolution measurements of ecosystem processes across the tropics. These plots help track forest productivity, carbon cycling, vegetation structure, biodiversity and ecosystem responses to environmental change.
Long-term ecological research across the tropics
I lead the Ecosystems and Biodiversity Programme at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, bringing together research across natural science, social science, policy and governance.
I am Professor of Ecosystem Science at Oxford and Jackson Senior Research Fellow at Oriel College. I am also a Trustee of the Natural History Museum, London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. I have previously served as President of the British Ecological Society and the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation.