Hefin Jones

Biography

I studied for my first degree in Zoology at King’s College, London between 1979 and 1982, and my PhD at Imperial College, London studying insect host-parasitoid interactions. On leaving Silwood Park in 1985 I joined what was then the National Vegetable Research Station (Wellesbourne) (now part of the School of Life Sciences, Warwick University) as a New Initiative Research Fellow to work on the effects of interspecific competition during host plant selection by pest insects. I returned to Silwood Park in 1988, first joining the Silwood Centre for Pest Management and then the Biology Department as a post-doctoral researcher working on the role of spatial heterogeneity in the dynamics of insect host-parasitoid interactions on thistles. In 1994 I was appointed Research Fellow and Project Leader for the Ecotron controlled environment facility at the NERC Centre for Population Biology (CPB) at Silwood Park. I joined Cardiff University in 2000.

Research Interest

My research interests are broad, and encompass population and community ecology, climate change and biodiversity. They centre on three main areas: soil biodiversity, concentrating on the interactions between below-ground and above-ground herbivory, the relationship between soil biota diversity and ecosystem processes, and, more recently, interactions between soil organisms; host-parasitoid and insect-plant-natural enemy interactions, mainly concentrating on the interacting insects’ behaviour and relating this to their population and community dynamics; and thirdly, the consequences of climate change on these interspecific interactions. While most of my research has concentrated on terrestrial ecosystems I have recently broadened my interest to include freshwater ecosystems also.