Philip Hulme

Biography

Philip Hulme holds the inaugural Chair in Plant Biosecurity at Lincoln University, a unique position jointly supported by Lincoln University and the New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, which aims to bridge the gap between academic research and policy implementation in this strategically important field. Prof Hulme, a leading invasion biologist, has long argued for better communication between scientists and practitioners (Hulme 2003) and helped identify key disparities between the needs of managers and research priorities (Andreu et al. 2009) while developing tools to better inform invasive species management (Wadsworth et al. 2000), risk assessment (Dawson et al. 2009a) and policy response (Hulme et al. 2008; Hulme et al. 2009). More recently, as an editor of the Journal of Applied Ecology, he launched Practitioners’ Perspectives a new feature to give voice to stakeholders in mainstream ecology journals (Hulme 2011a). Prof Hulme is currently the leader of the Biosecurity Theme in the Bio-Protection Research Centre.

Research Interest

His primary research focus is predicting the risks arising from plant invasions and recent work includes examining the traits that underpin the success of invasive species (Dawson et al. 2009; Diez et al. 2009); clarifying the main routes by which these species are introduced to a region (Hulme 2011b); assessing their rates of spread once introduced (Aikio et al. 2010a, b); gauging the vulnerability of habitats to plant invasion (Affre et al. 2010; Pyšek et al. 2010a), quantifying the impacts of invasive species on these habitats (Meffin et al. 2010; Vilà et al. 2011) and predicting the potential impact of climate change on invasive species distributions (Hulme 2011c). However, research also includes wider assessments of biological invasions and increasingly the importance of human perspectives such as the role of trade and wealth creation on invasion rates (Hulme 2009; Pyšek et al. 2010b; Essl et al. 2011) as well as the importance of appreciating the non-market costs of alien species impacts (Vilà et al. 2010). A wide range of approaches are applied to address these issues including modelling, experiments and field surveys with research undertaken across the world from the forests of North America (Lemke et al. 2011) and East Africa (Dawson et al. 2009a,b) to the montane ecosystems of Italy (Marini et al. 2010) and New Zealand (Meffin et al. 2010). Further details of the research can be found here.