Joseph Millard

Curriculum Vitae

2017–Present: PhD Researcher, London NERC DTP, Institute of Zoology and UCL
2016–2017: Programme Assistant, Species Programme, UNEP-WCMC
2015–2016: Publishing Assistant, Scientific Reports, Springer Nature
2014–2015: MSc Biodiversity and Conservation, University of Leeds
2011–2014: BSc Zoology, University of Leeds

Research Interests

I am primarily interested in using informatics tools to better understand ecosystems, biodiversity change, and the public perception of biodiversity: How can we better collect, aggregate, and store data for biodiversity modelling? How can we use literature text-mining to develop our understanding of biodiversity change? What can we learn from web-scraping about the public perception of biodiversity?

Current Research

In my PhD I aim to develop our understanding of global pollinator decline, applying statistical models, text-mining, and machine learning to predict how pollinators will respond to environmental change. Globally 75% of wild and crop plant species are thought to be pollinated to some extent by animals, with an estimated global value of $230-410 billion dollars. Across North America and Europe, numerous studies have documented declines in pollinating animals. A number of anthropogenic drivers—primarily land-use modification and climate change—have been associated with these losses. However, the extent to which pollinators may decline in the future, and how this might influence communities of species, is largely unknown. I will collate current knowledge on pollinator decline, distribution, and functional traits, before building models to predict the response of pollinating animals to future environmental change. I will also explore developments in the novel field of conservation culturomics, using web-scraping and text mining to develop metrics for pollinator awareness, and in turn progress on Aichi Biodiversity Target 1.

Previous Work

Prior to my PhD I worked for UNEP-WCMC with the Species Programme. The work of the Species Programme concerns supporting international species conventions, such as the CMS (Convention on Migratory Species) and CITES (Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species). At the organisation I collaborated with the team to build a new automated data handling system for the processing of CITES data. I also wrote a number of species trade reviews for the European commission, contributed towards an Amazonian trade review, and co-wrote a CITES trade manual for the Ecuadorian government. Before UNEP-WMC I was with the open-access journal Scientific Reports, responsible for handling manuscripts from submission to decision.