Biography
Cath Tayleur is a Conservation Scientist with the RSPB working on a project funded by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative to map and assess the distribution of eco-certification schemes for tropical crops.
Where and how commodities are grown has important implications for global biodiversity and in recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the supply and demand for eco-certified products. Eco-certification schemes provide an important framework for enhancing the sustainability of our supply chains, but we currently know little about where certified farms are located. In her current project she will map the location and extent of tropical crop eco-certification and use this to (1) assess the distribution of certified crops in relation to areas of biodiversity, deforestation and poverty; (2) identify priority regions for enhancing positive outcomes; and (3) investigate opportunities for leveraging more strategic spatial targeting of agricultural eco-certification.
She is also interested in combining community and individual approaches to gain perspective on climate change mechanisms. To do this, she has studied macroecological patterns, population trends and distribution shifts using data from national surveys in Sweden and the UK. During her research at the Centre for Environmental and Climate Research at Lund University, she examined changes in bird assemblages, identified the contribution of different species to community changes, assessed the distributional and abundance changes of individual species and sought to characterize the traits that influence species response.
Prior to this, she was based at the British Trust for Ornithology, where she worked on the evaluation of agri-environment schemes in England, determining their efficacy for the delivery of farmland bird conservation targets.
