Mathematical Theory and Biological Applications of Diversity

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Assessing diversity is fundamental to research across the life sciences. The project will strengthen interdisciplinary links across the mathematics-life sciences interface, enhance existing BBSRC-funded research using diversity and, if we succeed in demonstrating the power and generality of the approach, it will offer long-term impact for researchers across the life sciences and to many beneficiaries beyond the academic arena.

1. The researchers involved in this proposal will directly benefit from their enhanced understanding of the mathematical theory and biological applications of diversity, will develop their leadership skills through their joint pursuit of a currently unrecognised unifying theme across well established BBSRC research areas, and will develop their interdisciplinary skills by working across traditional academic boundaries. These promise to be long-term benefits and connections thanks to the universities' joint commitment to give permanent affiliate / visiting researcher status to each of the interchangers.

2. The Boyd Orr Centre for Population and Ecosystem Health will benefit directly from expanding its interdisciplinary remit beyond its current focus on external impact. The centre won the Queen's Anniversary Prize in 2013 for its excellence in applied interdisciplinary research, achieving a diverse range of development and policy impacts across the world. This project allows us to integrate pure mathematicians into the centre and provide them with a route for academic impact, as well as strengthening our increasingly interdisciplinary and inter-institutional foundation. It creates a new way of working that cuts across the life sciences and offers a direct link into the physical sciences, expanding the reach of the centre into more areas of basic science.

3. The development of such a new cross-cutting theme across the life sciences would also allow research areas to cross-fertilise each other more easily, with advances in analytical techniques in one area, such as quantitative genetics and animal breeding, being able to be translated to and applied in other areas, such as assessment of biodiversity impacts or landscape epidemiology.

4. Correctly identifying the links between these fields will also allow us to generate theoretically sound and widely applicable tools for analysis and provide a consistent approach to new research areas as we integrate them into this framework, leading to higher quality proposals for future research. The symposia we will run at the end of the project will specifically address this goal: discussing the conclusions of our work with our collaborators in the life sciences will enable us to utilise these developments in future applications.

5. Our use of branches of pure mathematics not previously associated with applications has already begun to draw pure mathematicians (e.g. analysts and topologists) into the study of diversity, establishing new connections between scientific disciplines and creating a rich new pathway for knowledge transfer from mathematics into the life sciences.

6. Our longer term aim is to forge close links with biodiversity research, where key beneficiaries include biodiversity and conservation organisations. By providing a coherent and powerful framework that allows the quantification of diversity and its partitioning across space and time, we will provide better and more powerful tools for assessing biodiversity loss and the impact of human activity, environment, and climate change on diversity. Policy makers responsible for decisions on biodiversity management will benefit from a more powerful and systematic scientific basis for assessing biodiversity loss. We anticipate longer-term success in global biodiversity management through impact on the newly emerging Essential Biodiversity Variables.