DR RUTH THURSTAN

I am interested in the drivers and outcomes of ecological change in our oceans, and in particular, how we measure and communicate the scale of change that occurred prior to the onset of regular scientific monitoring?

What drives my passion of this research is that it includes collaborating with stakeholders and researchers from multiple disciplines, meaning you constantly need to think outside of your disciplinary ‘box’. How do you find out about abundance trends when scientific monitoring data doesn’t exist for a location or a species in the past? What other sources of data may exist and what can they tell us? How do you correctly interpret historical sources from a particular time period and context? How do you know if the changes being witnessed are natural or human-induced? These are the questions that I consider for every project, whether I’m exploring changes in a commercially fished species, a coastal habitat, or human communities through time, and whether I’m looking at data from 20 years or 200 years ago.