Anne Magurran - Biography#

Anne Magurran (AEM) is an ecologist working on biological diversity. Her research combines fieldwork and experimental approaches with modelling and statistical analysis to quantify change in biological diversity over space and time, and to elucidate the processes that shape these patterns. By shedding light on the mechanisms that structure ecological communities, and advancing the methods used to quantify biodiversity change, her work has informed the scientific response to the ongoing biodiversity crisis. She has BSc and PhD degrees from the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, and held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Bangor (Wales) and Oxford (England) before taking up a faculty position at the University of St Andrews (Scotland). AEM’s work, which involves collaborations across 5 continents, has influenced the measurement of biodiversity; her books on the topic are used by researchers, conservationists and managers worldwide and have become benchmark references in the field. Her ERC AdG BioTIME project has helped shape thinking about the nature of biodiversity change during the Anthropocene; she was selected by the ERC to present her work at the Davos WEF in 2018. AEM’s publications include 3 monographs, 2 edited volumes (one with R.M. May, the other with B.J. McGill), 2 edited issues of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, > 200 peer-reviewed papers in journals that include Nature, Science, Nature Communications, Science Advances, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US), Proceedings of the Royal Society of London and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, alongside many additional scholarly contributions. Her work has been cited >65k times and has an h-index of 87 (google scholar).

List of publications