Yann Clough is a Professor at the Centre for Environmental and Climate Science (CEC) and a principal investigator at BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate at Lund University. His research focuses on how policy and management decisions affect land use, which in turn affects species communities and interactions, as well as ecosystem functions and services. Would you like to know more? Read the interview below!
What is currently at the top of your research agenda?
My research team focuses on how land use is affected by decisions at the policy and management levels and how land use, in turn, affects species communities and interactions and ecosystem functions and services. Many of the projects we are engaged in are interdisciplinary, and of a more applied nature, but not all. I am currently devoting a large share of my own time, funded through an ERC consolidator grant, to assessing how land use at the landscape scale affects semi-natural grassland plant communities through pollination services. To do that, we set up a big cage experiment manipulating pollinators in a grassland we established in Borgeby, as well as pollinator semi-exclusions in multiple pastures across Skåne. The community-level effects of insects on plants are surprisingly poorly known, partly because of methodological challenges, and the not-so-rarely encountered perception that insect-plant interactions are not so relevant compared to abiotic factors and competition. My previous experience from other systems told me that you really don’t know before you look at these effects properly. This sounds like curiosity-driven ecological research, which is true. Still, at the same time, the concerns about insect declines mean that these questions are also important from an environmental perspective.
Tell us about your latest publication.
A few weeks ago, we published a review paper in Biological Reviews presenting the state-of-the art in what we know about how pollinators mediate landscape-scale land use to effects on plant communities and ecosystem functioning. It was a team effort led together by the Postdoc, Veronica Hederström, with contributions from the PhD students in the ERC project, Theresia Krausl and Yuanyuan Quan, and several senior colleagues who contributed their expertise in ecology and evolution. It was tougher than I expected since research in pollinator and pollination ecology has been expanding fast during the time of writing. Junior researchers, be sceptical when your PI comes up with the idea that writing a review based on the state-of-the-art section of a proposal would be low-hanging fruit! But the result has been a milestone and has become a very valuable knowledge bank for us now that we are writing up our original research papers in the project.
What led you to your particular field of research?
My interest in insect-plant interactions originates from practical on-farm experience in Europe, East Asia and the Indian Ocean that insects can actually matter; an insight that matched well with an interest in invertebrate ecology and identification skills acquired during basic university education. Later on, facing less well-researched study systems as an early-career researcher, I was really pushed to have a curious, open-minded approach when deciding what to focus on. Devising cage experiments replicated at the landscape scale to exclude different animal groups from tree crops such as cacao and oil palm in earlier research projects has been a good learning basis for the type of ecological research I do today. In addition, I have had the chance to already, from the PhD onwards, conduct ecological research in interdisciplinary settings, which allowed me to realise the importance of both ecological processes and socio-economic drivers in understanding land use change and its drivers and consequences. I think this insight has been very helpful in asking pertinent “bigger questions” and securing funding to work with colleagues from other disciplines to try and answer them.
What are the implications of your research for society?
Knowing the importance of land-use effects and species interactions in the functioning of the ecosystem, and in ecosystem services supporting crop production, is something that is often very interesting for professionals and the public alike. It is a prerequisite for the sound management of agricultural systems and can sometimes be relevant for policymaking. Of course, a lot of things are important when it comes to on-farm decisions, so here, it is important to be on top of the bigger picture. This is where those of our studies that look at both ecological and economic components are often particularly of interest. For instance, they can help decision-makers see which types of environmental-friendly management seem to pay off by themselves, through their effects on ecosystem services, and which may require subsidies.
Finally, let´s say you have unlimited research funds; where would your research be five years from now?
Having very broad interests can be dangerous for a scientist, so “unlimited” funding sounds like a double-edge sword! If this were to happen five years from now, I hope, of course, that we would have succeeded in identifying the most important blind spots in the current research and made significant contributions to resolving them. These include “small blind spots” tied to methodological limitations, where paths forward are emerging with novel technologies and model-data integration. Other ones are linked to current limitations in the spatial and temporal scale of our research, which are hampering broader understanding and stand in the way of properly assessing the importance of biodiversity for ecosystem functions and services over time – and under a changing climate.
Thank you for a very interesting interview, Yann! We wish you the best of luck and success in your future path!
(Main photo: Yann Clough’s archive)