Contact Dr Alice Johnston
- Email: A.S.Johnston@cranfield.ac.uk
Areas of expertise
- Agrifood Systems
- Carbon, Climate and Risk
- Computing, Simulation & Modelling
- Monitoring and Environmental Informatics
- Soil
- Soil Resources
Background
Alice is an ecologist and modeller, with interests in biodiversity and ecosystem process responses to environmental change. Her research spans from predicting how invertebrates respond to multiple stressors such as plant protection products and habitat fragmentation to understanding how ecosystems regulate greenhouse gas emissions and temperature on a global scale. Alice completed a BSc (Hons) degree in Environmental Science at Newcastle University, followed by a PhD at University of Reading. Between her PhD and lecturer post at Cranfield, Alice consulted for industry as an ecological modeller and was awarded a NERC Independent Research Fellowship.
Current activities
Dr Alice Johnston's research focuses on gaining a mechanistic understanding of how organisms interact with their environment to determine population-, community- and ecosystem-level responses to environmental change. These mechanisms can be represented using different modelling approaches relevant to the spatio-temporal scales in question. At the field scale, for instance, Individual-based models (IBMs) allow for interactions between individual animals and spatially explicit environmental variables (e.g. temperature, food availability) and stressors (e.g. tillage, pesticides) to drive population responses. Alice is particularly interested in the development of a standardised mechanistic population modelling approach, in which representation of individual-level mechanisms (physiology, behaviour and evolution) are extensively tested across species and scenarios, to improve forecasts of animal responses to environmental change in the uncertain future. At the community and ecosystem level, Alice is interested in testing central ecological principles using large datasets to explore the links between soil communities and ecosystem functions (e.g. carbon cycling), and the ability of ecological theories to describe complex phenomena such as the temperature sensitivity of ecosystem respiration.
