Our lab recently received a grant from Singapore’s Ministry of Education to build a new framework for biodiversity accounting. The global biodiversity crisis has spurred efforts to quantify the relative biodiversity value of patches of land under different scenarios. Biodiversity accounting can support biodiversity impact assessment, biodiversity footprint estimation, and biodiversity credit market development. The World Economic Forum projects that annual demand for biodiversity credits could reach US$2 billion by 2030 and US$69 billion by 2050. Unfortunately, current frameworks for biodiversity accounting are mostly ad hoc and lead to misleading valuations in some cases. The biodiversity accounting framework we will develop under this new grant will be based on fundamental ecological and economic principles and will ultimately support more scientifically sound allocation of economic resources to protect natural capital.

Ryan is also a Partner Investigator on a recent Australian Research Council grant led by Lynette Loke of the University of Melbourne. The grant aims to scale up their previously successful approach to understanding ecological community diversity using a combined theoretical and experimental approach applied to intertidal systems.