Dr. Reto Schmucki

• Community & Population Ecology
• Trophic interactions
• Ecosystem Services & Global changes
• Conservation biology
• Plant-insect interactions

RESEARCH PROJECTS

ABLE (Assessing ButterfLies in Europe) is a partnership between Butterfly Conservation Europe, the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UK), the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Germany), Dutch Butterfly Conservation (The Netherlands) and Butterfly Conservation (UK). Building on work initiated at the CESAB, ABLE harness the strength of an international network of Butterfly Monitoring Schemes (eBMS) and expand the monitoring coverage across the EU, focusing on southern and eastern European countries. ABLE will produce high-quality information on butterfly populations and trends across Europe to provide the state of Europe's butterflies and help assessing the health of the environment and inform EU policies, including the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 and the Common Agricultural Policy. The ABLE project is run under a Service Contract for the European Union for a two-year period.

SURPASS (Safeguarding Pollination Services in a Changing World) is an international partnership to improve knowledge, build research capacity and initiate new collaborative actions for the conservation and sustainable use of pollinators across Latin America (LATAM). Our consortium aims to address the most important knowledge gaps identified by food producers, policy-makers, and land managers who need better evidence based tools to support decision making for sustainable outcomes. In 2018, we held a 5-day workshop in Puerto Blest, Argentina, bringing together 31 participants from 6 countries (UK, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia and Mexico) with a good representation of both early career and senior reseachers in the field of pollination ecology.  SURPASS was launched through Links Workshop grant, funded by the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and CONICET and delivered by the British Council.

SURPASS2 (Safeguarding Pollination Services in a Changing World: theory into practice) This 3-year project builds on the SURPASS project (Newton Phase 1). The SURPASS2 goal is to deliver evidence for the creation of resilient pollination services for sustainable economic growth, improved human health and wellbeing as well as positive environmental and agricultural outcomes. This will be addressed by five main objectives, co-designed with academics and stakeholders that establish interconnected work packages that build capacity to manage pollination services and provide tangible outcomes. This will be delivered through 4 work packages with specific aims; WP1) monitoring populations and understanding their distributions, WP2) understand how the environment in which pollinators live affect them, and how it affects their capacity to provide crop pollination, WP3) understanding national scale deficits in pollination for key crops and identifying areas where pollination services are at high risk, WP4) develop a national scale predictive framework to support policy goals of maximising benefits for agricultural productivity provided by pollination and enhance the suistainability and resilience of socio-ecological systems. SURPASS2 is a co-funded project, involving four research councils and fundations, NERC (UK), CONICET (Argentina), FAPESP (Brazil) and CONICYT (Chile). NERC grant no. NE/S011870/1.

BioINT is a direct follow up of Dr Hélène Audusseau's research on biotic interactions in butterfly communities (see our paper in Journal of biogeography). This project examines the role of parasitoids and apparent competition on the mortality and population dynamics in nettle feeding butterfly communities. BioINT aims at understanding the impact of species range shift on community structure and biotic interaction between host-parasitoids. This research project is funded through a postdoctoral fellowship granted to Dr Hélène Audusseau by the Swedish Research Council for a 3-year period. Hosted at the Centre of Ecology and Hydrology, BioINT is a collaboration between Stockholm University, Oxford University, University of Exeter, Université Paris Est and the Natioal  Museu de Ciències Naturals de Granollers in Spain.