Student Conference on Conservation Science

Keynote speakers

Prof. Teja Tscharntke

 Teja Tscharntke is a professor of Agroecology at the University of Göttingen, Germany. His research focuses on biodiversity  patterns and associated ecosystem functioning at different spatial and temporal scales and in managed and natural systems.  Field studies are based in tropical and temperate regions, comparing food webs and multitrophic interactions, but he is also  interested in multidisciplinary studies linking socioeconomic with ecological approaches. In the Agroecology Group, many  people are working on a number of collaborative projects – often aiming at potential tradeoffs between viable land-use  systems and biodiversity conservation in human-dominated, fragmented landscapes. 

 

 

 

Dr. Péter Szabó 

 Péter Szabó (born 1972 in Hungary) is Deputy Head of the Department of Vegetation Ecology at the Institute of Botany of the  Czech Academy of Sciences. Currently he is also Vice-President of the European Society for Environmental History. He is an  environmental historian/historical ecologist. By training a medievalist, in his early days he studied the history of woodland  management in the Carpathian Basin in the Middle Ages. After a post-doc at the Archaeological Institute of ELTE University in  Budapest, he moved to Brno in the Czech Republic. Between 2012 and 2016 he was the principal investigator of the  LONGWOOD European Research Council project. This interdisciplinary project combined archaeological, historical,  palaeoecological and vegetation ecological data to understand long-term woodland dynamics for a larger region in high  resolution focusing especially on the role of humans. His own work mostly focuses on forest history, especially on traditional management forms (coppicing, pollarding and the like), and he actively promotes the reintroduction of these techniques into forestry and nature conservation. He has also published on the history of historical ecology and on the theory and practice of interdisciplinary research.

 

Prof. Andrew Balmford

 Andrew Balmford is Professor of Conservation Science in the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, where his  main research interests are exploring how conservation might best be reconciled with land-demanding activities such as  farming, quantifying the costs and benefits of effective conservation, understanding why nature is being lost, and examining  what works in conservation. To have most impact he focuses his research in developing countries and collaborates closely  with conservation practitioners and with colleagues in other disciplines, including economics and psychology. He helped  establish the Cambridge Conservation Forum, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and the Student Conference on  Conservation Science. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Trustee of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds,  Europe’s largest conservation charity. His 2012 book Wild Hope highlights success stories in conservation and argues that cautious optimism is essential in tackling environmental challenges.

 http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/directory/andrew-balmford

 

Dr. György Pataki

 György Pataki (PhD in management and organisation science, MA in economics) is currently associate professor at the  Department of Decision Sciences, Institute of Business Economics, Corvinus Business School, Corvinus University of  Budapest, Hungary. He is also director of research at Corvinus Business School. He is a senior research fellow at the  Environmental Social Science Research Group (ESSRG), an independent research and development company. György acts  a board member of the European Society for Ecological Economics and served for four years as member of the  Multidisciplinary Expert Panel (MEP) of IPBES. His research previously focused on ethics and economics and business  ethics, later on sustainability challenges to business firms, then he has been involved in interdisciplinary research projects  with natural scientists on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Currently, he is engaged in research addressing different  aspects of science-society interactions through cooperative and participatory research and responsible research and  innovation (RRI) initiatives. He has always been an activist scientist of a long engagement with the Hungarian green movement.