About me

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Liverpool, United Kingdom
I am interested in how we can use DNA sequences to understand biodiversity – how do we recognise species, and how are species related at taxonomic, ecological and geographic levels? My passion for biodiversity research has led me from the world’s largest natural history collection - Natural History Museum, London, where I completed my MSc, to the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario - global centre for the international Barcode of Life, as a PhD student, and to the hyper-diverse tropics of Southeast Asia. The tropics will be the first regions to experience historically unprecedented climates and this will happen within the next decade. Consequently my recent research has focussed on understanding the effects of urbanisation and climate change on tropical and subtropical biodiversity - encompassing both species richness and ecological integrity across a diversity of taxonomic groups.

Aug 2, 2017

RESEARCH UPDATE - BATS

I've been working with bats in Peninsular Malaysia for some time now. I was interested in knowing how far we have got (and how far we have to go) to have DNA barcode records for all the bat species found in the region. In order to know this we first have to know (as accurately as is possible) how many species are present in the region. This paper which was mostly put together by VC Lim, a PhD student I cosupervise at the University of Malaya, is a major contribution to the study of bats in Malaysia, collating all records from the Peninsula together into one taxonomic review.

Here is the popular summary from Asia Research News: http://www.researchsea.com/html/article.php/aid/10960/cid/1/research/science/university_of_malaya/peninsular_malaysia_-_home_to_110_bats_species_.html

And here is the paper published in PLOS ONE: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0179555

This Long-winged Tomb Bat (Taphazous longimanus) is a first record for Krau Wildlife Reserve, Peninsular Malaysia. Copyright : VC Lim