The Ben Collen Memorial Lecture 2025

The Ben Collen Memorial Lecture is an annual event at which UCL’s Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research hosts a world-leading, mid-career scientist in the field of conservation biology. The lecture is in honour of Dr. Ben Collen who was a renowned conservation scientist and greatly admired colleague. Ben died in 2018 aged 40.

This year’s speaker is Dr Michelle Jackson from University of Oxford who will deliver a talk entitled 'Hot Waters and Dirty Currents: The Impacts of Warming and Sewage'.

The lecture will take place on 1st July 2025, 16:00pm, at B40 Darwin LT, Darwin Building, UCL.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception to which you are all warmly invited. The event is open to colleagues from inside and outside UCL.

Title: 'Hot Waters and Dirty Currents: The Impacts of Warming and Sewage'

Abstract:
Our planet is rapidly warming and maximum temperature records across the world continue to be broken, with last year the warmest on record. Despite this, there is still a lot of uncertainty in our understanding of how ecosystems will respond to rising temperatures. This knowledge gap becomes even more evident when considering the fact that, typically, temperature does not act alone - multiple anthropogenic stressors are often involved in affecting ecological systems. For instance, a stressor that is facing increasing scrutiny is water pollution from sewage. Here, I will discuss some of my group’s research which aims to improve our understanding of these two important stressors – warming and pollution. We will consider their independent and combined effects (from individuals to ecosystems), how these vary under different conditions, and how we can make better predictions about multiple stressors in general.

Bio:
My main research interest lies in understanding individual-to-ecosystem level responses to environmental change, including warming, invasion, pollution and habitat loss. I am particularly interested in interactions among these stressors, and how stressor effects cascade through food webs with implications for ecosystem processes and services. I use a combination of field studies across both natural and anthropogenic stressor gradients, manipulative experiments and meta-analyses to seek general predictive rules in multiple stressor effects. Most of my research is in freshwater ecosystems, spanning from the Arctic to the tropics.