Last month, the ASE had the pleasure of hosting Professor Sandra Diaz from the University of Cordoba, Argentina, for a week. Prof Diaz is Co-chair of the IBPES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), which stood behind the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services last year. The work she did for IPBES she was identified by Nature as one of the 10 scientists that mattered most in 2019. However, the focus of her research carrier has been ecology of plant functional traits, and for this research she has earned many distinctions, including Member of the US National Academy of Sciences and Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society.
Professor Diaz visited ASE over Jan 20-24 hosted by the NTU-Smithsonian Partnership, on collaborative work with Prof David Wardle and Dr Deepthi Chimalakonda on the topic of how biodiversity loss globally affects ecosystem functioning in real ecosystems. During her visit she gave two seminars, one on her IBPES work to the CoS Grad Students seminar series (Jan 22), and one on her research on plant traits work to the ASE (Jan 23). Despite the message from IPBES of rapidly declining biodiversity and environmental decline, she brought a positive message that it is not to late to act and there are many things we can do, but we have to do them now.