We have good links with the University of Cambridge, our funding partner—especially with the Department of Zoology and the Conservation Biology Group there. This linkage is about research and training, so we have a number of collaborators as well as research students in conservation science. Of course we have other linkages that go further out, both nationally and internationally.

Although we are an independent organization, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) funds our research as if we were a university department, which means that the quality of our work is subject to the UK Research Assessment Exercise. So how do we differ from a research group in a university? The answer to that is we are distinctive because of our two-way communication with conservation bodies: we seek to listen to what’s going on in practical conservation. Our most-cited papers show that we have a good track record of finding out what the emerging scientific issues are and then seeking solutions.

We have a specific partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. We also have a huge network of collaborators that we are proud of, many in North America. Through various projects we also maintain field stations; currently we have a particular focus in India, Tanzania, and the Galapagos.

In the late 1990s we all became aware of the risks to both people and wildlife posed by infectious diseases. This was later reinforced by high-profile outbreaks of livestock-related disease, such as foot and mouth disease, BSE (mad cow disease), and most recently the Asian bird flu epidemic. Our wildlife disease group has looked at the extent to which wildlife has also experienced infectious diseases, not just with implications for wild populations but potentially having implications for humans because some of these diseases can transfer to people.

Our top paper, by Peter Daszak, who is now in the US but remains an important collaborator, and Andrew Cunningham, the head of wildlife disease at the Institute, puts together a conceptual model about the linkages and drivers of infectious disease (Daszak P., Cunningham A.A., Hyatt A.D., "Wildlife ecology—emerging infectious diseases of wildlife—threats to biodiversity and human health," Science 287[5452]: 443-49, 21 January 2000). They examined how the emergence of these diseases in the human population is being escalated by current patterns of human movement and activity: we all travel a lot more, for example. They pointed out in this paper that there could be new diseases in wildlife, and this would have huge implications for biodiversity and human health. They’ve been proven to be right on these things, which is why the paper is highly cited. And, of course, the present concerns about Asian bird flu add to its topicality. Since Andrew is here you might bring him into the conversation.

Our study brings together information on what wildlife diseases are out there, what impact they have on wildlife, and assesses the impact on livestock and human health. Many researchers have talked about the importance of wildlife diseases, but no one had brought together information from the different fields (conservation, livestock health, and human health). We found in doing this review that wildlife diseases are a major problem for biodiversity conservation, livestock production, and human health. This is a review whose time had come. It reinforces what a lot of people had suspected, but it also brought firmly into the more traditional animal ecology arena that wildlife diseases were important for population dynamics. Prior to this, wildlife disease did not register with wildlife ecologists as an important factor: they concentrated on predators, food resources, space—disease was something they might have, but didn’t seem important. This paper has had a big part to play in changing peoples’ perceptions of the importance of pathogens.

This was by Bob Wayne, who was then head of genetics here. A microsatellite is a short segment of highly repetitive DNA in which the repeated unit consists of two or four nucleotides. Microsatellites are hypervariable bits of the genome so they give you very fine-scale resolution among individuals that allows you deduce useful information about the structure of wild populations. Wayne pioneered the use of microsatellites as a genetic marker for looking at the structure of wild populations in a conservation context. This was a new technique at the time. That’s why it’s highly cited—it’s the first really good use of the technique. The northern wombat is a restricted tiny population. This paper studied microsatellites to say just how compromised this particular population was.

This is concerned with a fungal disease in amphibians, chytridiomycosis, which has probably always been there in wild populations. It grows around membranes in the mouth and nasal passages, and appears to become pathological only under certain environmental conditions. So, here we have a situation where there is a link between the spread of disease and the environment in which it becomes pathological. The third paper shows that the same fungus lineage was causing a real problem in Central America and Australia, so it looks like it’s been spread globally, which is characteristic of emerging diseases. Amphibians globally are now over 30% threatened with extinction. The two main drivers of this are disease and habitat change.

There are other remarkable developments from this research group in the Institute that follow this paper. In particular, vulture declines in India. From the mid 1990s to the beginning of this century we were seeing 50% declines in the vulture population per year; at that rate you soon get to zero! Vultures were once hugely abundant on the Indian sub-continent where they play an important part in the ecosystem. The decline in the vulture population was first noticed through an increase in rotting carcasses. We were heavily involved in diagnosing the cause of their decline. At first an avian disease was implicated, because it was a continent-wide population crash at an incredibly high rate. The principal cause is not in fact disease. It is the veterinary drug diclofenac (also widely prescribed for pain relief in humans) that is a therapeutic as an anti-inflammatory for cattle but is incredibly toxic to vultures. Now, the emphasis is on replacing this drug in livestock. However, following the vulture declines, there are an increased number of carcasses (mainly domestic cattle) lying around, and the feral dog population has grown enormously, which has a knock-on effect of human health, including an increased risk of rabies. The Institute’s work on this wildlife-human interaction should make a strong impact in the future.

My paper, "Considering evolutionary processes in conservation biology," (Crandall, K.A., et al., Trend. Ecol. Evolut. 15[7]:290-5, July 2000), reflects one aspect. If you are going to direct conservation actions onto wild populations, how do you decide what units to break those into? Traditionally we talk about species. But sometimes in practice that does not work very well because you could have a very widespread species, with many ecologically significant regional populations. So what do you do? Should all species be conserved everywhere, or is it enough to be selective: by saying we have a really good conservation plan in this location and that’s going to be the limit to our actions? This is a very significant area for conservation policy.

In practice there has been a tendency for conservation planners to be precautionary about this: if there is any local population, the local agencies will say we’ve got to conserve this population, and often there will also be a tendency to preserve it in isolation, so as to maintain its distinctiveness. Partly this is because people value locally distinct forms, but also it is good risk management—it is far easier to mix than to un-mix populations. Before you know where you are, you’ve got far more species of, say, wolf, than you thought you had!

I am interested in this because defining the units for conservation is the first thing you’ve got to do before you do any priority setting or optimizing resources. My co-author Bob Wayne was interested in it because, as a geneticist, he was concerned that this tendency to focus on and to maintain isolated populations was potentially genetically damaging. For many species you may need to preserve the gene flow, as this will allow the species to continue to adapt.

We looked into the literature on this. There are two sorts of paradigm for how to determine the population units for conservation management. One is their genetic distinctiveness. Measures of genetic variability within and among populations, or possibly the morphological traits with a genetic basis, can be analyzed to reveal the most distinctive subunits. When there are unique traits, a population will then be regarded as an independent unit for conservation. But actually these variants could be there by chance; it does not necessarily mean they are locally adapted. The alternative paradigm uses information on the ecological role of the species, and whether the population in any one location is occupying a different niche. This might mean that migrants from other populations could not successfully establish there. It turned out that most recent studies focused on genetic rather than ecological information, yet there was little consistency. We came up some ways of diagnosing whether you had each kind of evidence in a particular case. It’s not really a methods paper: we really dealt with conceptual issues, and that is why the paper is well-cited. We pulled out the important genetic components and separated those from the demographic and ecological components, tending to emphasize the latter over the former.