Ecosystem Health Lab

Global change and health lab based at the Natural History Museum (London, UK) focusing on biodiversity loss, climate and land-use change, zoonotic spillover, vector-borne disease, surveillance, and emerging infectious disease risk.

Ecosystem Health Lab — biodiversity, global change, and health

Image credit: Madi Hewitson.

The Ecosystem Health Lab investigates how global change processes shape human societies through their effects on ecological systems and human–environment interactions. We focus on climate change, land-use change, and biodiversity loss, and how these processes influence biodiversity conservation, human health and wellbeing, and the emergence and redistribution of infectious disease risk at the human–wildlife interface.

Our work integrates ecological theory with quantitative and data-integrative approaches, drawing on large-scale biodiversity data, environmental and climatic datasets, epidemiological records, and natural history collections. Across projects, we examine how ecological change alters animal community composition, species’ geographic ranges, and the evolutionary and ecological dynamics of hosts, vectors, and pathogens over space and time. This includes research on zoonotic spillover, vector-borne disease emergence under climate change, and broader questions of animal and pathogen responses to rapid environmental change in the Anthropocene.

We are interested in risks relevant to the UK and more widely, including climate-driven changes in rodent-, tick-, and mosquito-borne systems, and on anticipating future threats such as Lassa Fever, Ebola, Dengue, West Nile virus, Lymes disease and Tick-borne Encephalitis. To address these questions, we employ a range of modelling approaches, including mechanistic mathematical models, statistical mixed-effects models informed by causal thinking, and machine-learning methods such as neural networks and large language models. Across the lab, we prioritise reproducibility, generalisable inference, and the development of tools that can support conservation planning, public health surveillance, and policy engagement under uncertainty.

Projects · People · Contact · Publications · Github

Projects

Here are some current externally funded projects:

People

PI
Dr. David Redding

Postdoctoral Researchers
Dr. Abi Smith
Dr. Gonzalo Albaladejo Robles
Dr. Gregory Milne
Dr. Joby Razzelliot
Dr. Jose Gabriel Nino Barreat

Bioinformatics
Artur Trebski https://www.ar-treb.com/

Doctoral Researchers
Mollie Mills (Royal Holloway, London NERC DTP) https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/en/persons/mollie-mills/
Maarten Vanhaverbeke (LSHTM, OneZoo)
Madi Hewitson (UCL, LiDo)
Santiago Rayment Gomez (LSHTM, OneZoo)

Research Support and Students
Jacinta Healy (Research Assistant)
Lilith Marino-Brandon (Master’s student, UCL)

Alumni
Dr. Natalie Imirzian (now Senior Scientist at Pivotal Future)
Dr. Elise Gallois (now a data scientist at UKCEH)
Harry Gordon (now a PhD candidate at University of East Anglia)
Ana Martinez-Checa Guiote (now a event assistant at NHM)

Contact

For collaborations, student enquiries, postdoctoral opportunities, or policy and public health engagement, please email:
David Redding

Latest Publications

For recent lab publications see: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=bzH6AJ4AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate

Github

Lab code repo: https://github.com/BioDivHealth