William N. W. Fincham

UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology | CEH · UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology Wallingford

Changes in the frequency of extreme weather events related to climate change potentially pose significant challenges to UK agricultural production. There is a need for improved climate change risk assessments to support adaptation strategies and to ensure security of food production in future. We describe an innovative and practical framework for s...

Invasive non‐native species and climate change are two of the greatest pressures facing freshwater communities; however, how they interact to impact ecosystem function remains poorly understood despite the potential for impacts on key functional behaviours, such as detritivory, which could have wide‐reaching impacts. We quantified the rates of detr...

While abiotic drivers of yields represent important limiting factors to crop productivity, the role of biotic drivers that could be directly managed by farmers (e.g. agri‐environment schemes supporting key ecosystem services) remains poorly understood. Precision yield mapping provides an opportunity to understand the factors that limit agricultural...

Invasive alien species (IAS) can drive community change through ecological interactions. Parasites and pathogens can play an important role in community function including mitigating or enhancing IAS impacts. Despite this, the degree to which pathogen pressure influences IAS impacts remains poorly understood. We quantified the predatory behaviour o...

Invasive non-native species place high pressures on native communities and can result in ecological impacts often associated with differences in key functional behaviours that mediate top-down and bottom-up forces. In this thesis, I use two model systems, the UK Coccinellidae system and the UK freshwater amphipod system, to quantify per-capita diff...

Global biodiversity is threatened by multiple anthropogenic stressors but little is known about the combined effects of environmental warming and invasive species on ecosystem functioning. We quantified thermal preferences and then compared leaf-litter processing rates at eight different temperatures (5.0–22.5 °C) by the invasive freshwater crustac...

Maintaining and improving water quality is key to the protection and restoration of aquatic ecosystems, which provide important benefits to society. In Europe, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) defines water quality based on a set of biological, hydro-morphological and chemical targets, and aims to reach good quality conditions in all river bodie...