Dr Alexander Lees

QUALIFICATIONS

• PhD 2008: University of East Anglia, thesis title: “Synergistic effects of forest disturbance and fragmentation on a species-rich Amazonian avifauna”
• BSc Biological Sciences First Class. 1998-2002 University of East Anglia, UK
• PGCLTHE 2018 Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Distinction.  

PREVIOUS EMPLOYMENT AND AFFILIATIONS

• Oct 2015–Sep 2016, Postdoctoral Fellow, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University, USA.
• Oct 2012–Sep 2015, CNPq Postdoctoral Fellow, Goeldi Museum, Brazil.
• May 2012–Oct 2012, Visiting Fellow, Cambridge University, UK.
• Jun 2010–Apr 2012, CAPES Post-doctoral Scholar, Goeldi Museum, Brazil.

RESEARCH OVERVIEW

• Conservation in human-modified tropical forest landscapes
• Developing new tools to cost-effectively sample biodiversity in tropical forests
• Quantifying the impact of trade on biodiversity and how to mitigate its impacts on wildlife
• Providing an evidence-base for the conservation of threatened bird species
• Avian migration and vagrancy

I have been working on Amazonian conservation issues for over 19 years and am one of the co-investigators of the Sustainable Amazon Network which attempts to understand the trade-offs between biodiversity value, ecosystem services and economic development along tropical agricultural frontiers. I spent five years (2010-2015) working at the Goeldi Museum in the Brazilian Amazon with which institution I still maintains close ties and a year at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University in 2015-2016. Beyond intensive field-work supported studies aiming to understand land-use change, and the drivers of past, current and future biodiversity loss I am involved in leading on several large-scale syntheses and meta-analyses addressing macro-ecological and phylogenetic work at large scales to understand the context and interplay of ecological and evolutionary factors.

Community, charity and NGO links

1. UNITED NATIONS Science Panel for the Amazon; I am one of 250 scientists (only 9 from the UK) who make up this international panel convened by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network which released its inaugural report during COP-26 of which I was a co-author on four chapters.

2. IUCN Species Survival Commission Red List Authority; I am a member of this group which guides Red Listing efforts to rank bird conservation priority-setting, a key technique to securing the future of tropical wildlife by conferring protected status to threatened species (e.g. Lees 2015 Nature).

3. Senior evaluator for the Brazilian government’s Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation; participating in Red Listing exercises. I am a co-author on 23 species accounts in the Brazilian Red List book Livro Vermelho da Fauna Brasileira Ameaçada de Extinção Volume III – Aves.

4. British Ornithologists Union Records Committee; (2017-) the BOURC is formed of ten individuals responsible for maintaining the British List, the official list of birds recorded in Britain

5. Manchester Biodiversity Action Group (2019-) responsible for delivery of the Manchester Biodiversity Action Plan with representatives from other local universities, the city council and eNGOS.

6. Comitê Brasileiro de Registros Ornitológicos (2015 – 2021) I was the only member of this committee - responsible for maintaining the official list of birds recorded in Brazil - from outside of South America. 

7. Multi-regional reviewer for the eBird initiative, the largest global biodiversity citizen science project and review coordinator for the UK (July 2015 – present)

Expert reviewer for external funding bodies including Newton Fund, British Council, UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships, NERC Independent Research Fellowships, and Daphne Jackson Fellowships.

Publons reviewer profile: https://publons.com/researcher/1186712/alexander-charles-lees/peer-revi…

Editorial Board membership

• Subject Editor Biotropica (August 2014 – October 2020) 
• Section Editor Brazilian Journal of Ornithology (October 2011 – July 2017)
• Associate Editor, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi Ciências Naturais. (December 2011 – July 2015)
• Associate Editor Biota Neotropica. (January 2012 – December 2015)
• Editorial Committee member Neotropical Birding (July 2012 – present)

Membership of professional associations

Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation

British Ornithologist’s Union

American Ornithologist’s Union

My current research portfolio can be separated into six main strands:

1. Understanding the impacts of land-use change on biodiversity and ecosystem service provision in the Amazon basin. This work is largely within the auspices of my role as a steering committee member of the internationalSustainable Amazon Network. This explored for the first time for example: trade-offs in the conservation of freshwater and terrestrial biodiversity (Leal et al. 2020 Science), erosion of biodiversity services with land-use change (Hawes et al. 2020 Journal of Ecology), trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provision (Ferreira et al. 2018 Nature Climate Change) and the value of regenerating secondary forests for biodiversity and carbon sequestration (Lennox et al. 2018 Global Change Biology). This work has also challenged claims that cattle ranching is not a driver of deforestation (França, et al. 2021 Land Use Policy), revealed the local ecological knowledge of Amazonian smallholders (Mikołajczak et al. 2021 People and Nature), explored the influence of edge effects on biodiversity (Hatfield et al. 2020 Conservation Biology) and summarised the synergisms between threats to tropical ecosystems (Barlow et al. 2018 Nature, França, et al. 2020 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B).
2. Developing new tools to cost-effectively sample biodiversity in tropical forests. This work has been led by Dr Oliver Metcalf who undertook his PhD with me as DOS and continuing this work as an externally-funded PDRA using datacollected by the Sustainable Amazon Network. We have developed new methodologies for removing rain noise from large ecoacoustic datasets (Metcalf et al. 2020 Ecological Indicators), refining acoustic indices to better represent forest biodiversity (Metcalf et al. 2021 Methods in Ecology and Evolution) and optimising surveying of tropical birds using passive acoustic monitoring and high temporal resolution sampling (Metcalf et al. 2021 Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation). In addition, I have also highlighted the shortcomings of many attempts to survey tropical biodiversity (Robinson et al. 2018 Biotropica) and indicated pathways to better sample avian communities (Lees et al. 2020 Auk).
3. Quantifying the impact of trade on biodiversity and how to mitigate its impacts on wildlife. Many species of tropical songbirds are threatened by unsustainable levels of trade precipitating an Asian Songbird Crisis, work led by Dr Harry Marshall has clarified the extent of the trade (Marshall et al. 2020 Biological Conservation), the role of different user groups in the trade (Marshall et al. 2020 People and Nature) and identified best approaches to demand reduction (Marshall et al. 2020 Conservation Science and Practice). I have also recently worked on the impacts on hunting on shorebirds in Asia (Gallo-Cajiao et al. 2020 Biological Conservation) and co-authored a landmark paper revealing how environmental liability litigation can remedy biodiversity loss, e.g., against illegal trappers (Phelps et al. 2021 Conservation Letters).
4. Providing an evidence-base for the conservation of threatened bird species. My work for the past two decades has been intently focussed on the conservation of threatened tropical bird species. During the last four years I have worked on two species-specific papers that quantify change in conservation status of Neotropical species, one was focused on threatened Hyacinth Macaws (Devenish et al. 2020 Diversity and Distributions) and the other on the likely extinct Purple-winged Ground-Dove (Lees et al. 2021 Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution) as well as co-authoring a benchmark study assessing the efficacy of conservation actions in preventing extinctions of birds and mammals (Bolam et al. 2020 Conservation Letters). I was also a co-author on a re-evaluation of the taxonomy of an extinct Palearctic bird (Senfield et al. 2019 Ibis) and am currently involved in several similar clade-specific studies. Quantifying extinction rates and the efficacy of conservation is also critical to appraise the magnitude of the biodiversity crisis and combat ‘extinction denial’ an emerging variant of science denial (Lees et al. 2020 Nature Ecology and Evolution).     
5. Investigating how interspecific competition shapes avian phenotype and conservation status. Building on work using woodpeckers as a model species to understand how competition may drive mimicry (Leighton et al. 2018 Animal Behaviour) we developed a new framework to identify whether phenotypic convergence is the result of environmental or biological drivers (Miller et al. 2019 Nature Communications). These interspecific interactions are likely to be extremely important in shaping community structure (as we have previously shown in tropical forest systems: Bregman et al. 2015 Ecology), especially in urban environments (Lees 2018 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA) which may be exacerbated by well-meaning human interventions favouring dominant competitor species (Shutt & Lees 2021 Biological Conservation).
6. Documenting the spatiotemporal nature of poorly-understood avian dispersal syndromes such as vagrancy and intratropical migration. I have over a period of 20 years established myself as a leading expert on avian vagrancy, marked in 2021 by the publication of the first book on the subject ‘Vagrancy in Birds’ written with James Gilroy and published by Bloomsbury and Princeton University Press. Concurrently, a hypothesis that we first erected 18 years ago (Gilroy & Lees 2003 British Birds) termed the ‘pseudo-vagrancy’ paradigm was empirically validated this year (Lees & Gilroy 2021 Current Biology). I have also continued to publish papers describing novel migration patterns in Neotropical birds e.g., Lima & Lees (2021 Ibis).