Professor Katherine Willis
Kathy’s outstanding long-term ecological research has led to a new understanding of biodiversity baselines, thresholds of change, and the resilience of biological communities (to pests, pathogens and climate change) in some of the most biodiverse yet threatened regions of the world. This work is as a result of building a unique set of long-term datasets (fossil and historical), models and innovative technologies to determine the diversity, distribution and abundance of plants and animals across global landscapes over time intervals spanning 10s-1000s years. More recently she has also played a leading role in developing new innovative methodologies to remotely determine the distribution of natural capital assets across global landscapes that are important for human well-being. This research is in collaboration with a large network of international partners spanning 20 countries and 4 continents. She has also developed a large collaborative research network across Oxford University (departments of Engineering, Computing Sciences, Geography, Plant Sciences and Zoology). Here the research focus has been on the development of end-user tools to ensure that research outputs have maximum societal impact. Recent examples include two web- based tools that remotely determine areas for ecological risk and natural capital assets (see LEFT and https://naturetrade.net.)
In addition to her research, between 2013-2018 Kathy held the position of Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. During her tenure, she developed and launched new Science strategy (2015-2020) for Kew and as part of led the creation of a number of strategic outputs to disseminate Kew’s collections to a much wider global audience. These included the ‘Plants of the World’ online portal and three large-scale international reports on the State of the World’s Plants (2016, 2017) and State of the World’s Fungi (2018). In addition, she led the development of a Kew Collections strategy (2018-2028) to provide direction for Kew’s scientific collections over the next decade. Over the past 3 years, Kathy has also been a member of the UK Government’s Natural Capital Committee advising on the Government’s 25 Year environment plan and the UKs natural capital assets. Kathy has also been a lead author on the recently released 2019 Global Assessment for IPBES.
In 2018 Kathy was awarded as CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to biodiversity conservation.