Oscar Morton

Dr Oscar Morton has been a:
* Post-doctoral researcher, University of Cambridge (2023 - 2025)
* Research data manager, University of Sheffield (2021 - 2023)

He has a PhD in "Understanding the species-level impacts of wildlife trade", University of Sheffield (2019 - 2022) and an MRes in Ecology and Environment, University of Sheffield (2018 - 2019).

I'm interested in how we can best manage the current biodiversity crisis to ensure the best outcomes for people and nature. This spans from understanding why species are threatened to ensuring we have robust methods to assess the effectiveness of conservation actions. My current work focuses around 3 core themes.

(1) What determines how species are and are not used by people, how we can predict and assess when/if this use becomes a threat, and if unsustainable how will any impacts cascade through ecosystems and functional space.

(2) Can we harness large scale citizen science data and counterfactual approaches to develop a scalable evidence base to assess the impacts of species use across space and time.

(3) Developing tools to collect near real-time data on the illegal trade and use of species (seizures etc.) and the subsequent methods to address the limitations inherent to data on illegal activities.