Dr Oscar Morton
School of Biosciences
Research Associate
Full contact details
School of Biosciences
Alfred Denny Building
Western Bank
Sheffield
S10 2TN
- Profile
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Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, University of Sheffield (2025 - Present)
Post-doctoral researcher, University of Cambridge (2023 - 2025)
Research data manager, University of Sheffield (2021 - 2023)
PhD in "Understanding the species-level impacts of wildlife trade", University of Sheffield (2019 - 2022)
MRes Ecology and Environment, University of Sheffield (2018 - 2019)
- Research interests
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I'm interested in how we can best manage the current biodiversity crisis to ensure the best outcomes for people and nature. This spans from understanding why species are threatened to ensuring we have robust methods to assess the effectiveness of conservation actions. My current work focuses around 3 core themes.
(1) What determines how species are and are not used by people, how we can predict and assess when/if this use becomes a threat, and if unsustainable how will any impacts cascade through ecosystems and functional space.
(2) Can we harness large scale citizen science data and counterfactual approaches to develop a scalable evidence base to assess the impacts of species use across space and time.
(3) Developing tools to collect near real-time data on the illegal trade and use of species (seizures etc.) and the subsequent methods to address the limitations inherent to data on illegal activities.
- Publications
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Journal articles
- India’s agroecology programme, ‘zero budget natural farming’, delivers biodiversity and economic benefits without lowering yields. Nature Ecology & Evolution. View this article in WRRO
- Woody vegetation patches in South Indian rice landscapes support tree-affiliated birds but reduce food production, with complex non-linear effects. Landscape Ecology, 40(7). View this article in WRRO
- Evolutionarily distinct species are threatened by international trade. Current Biology, 35(12), 2848-2857.e3.
- Global risk of wildfire across timber production systems. Nature Communications, 16(1). View this article in WRRO
- Urgent Policy Change Is Needed to Understand the Dimensions of Legal International Wildlife Trade to Enable Targeted Management. Conservation Letters, 18(2).
- Colourful Brazilian anurans are preferentially targeted by wildlife trade. Biological Conservation, 302. View this article in WRRO
- Global dynamics of functional composition in CITES-traded reptiles. Ecological Applications, 35(1). View this article in WRRO
- Increasing timber and declining live plant diversity and volumes in global trade from 2000 to 2020. Communications Earth & Environment, 5. View this article in WRRO
- International wildlife trade quotas are characterized by high compliance and coverage but insufficient adaptive management. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 8, 2048-2057. View this article in WRRO
- Climate change will exacerbate land conflict between agriculture and timber production. Nature Climate Change, 14(10), 1071-1077.
- A sex-linked supergene with large effects on sperm traits has little impact on reproductive traits in female zebra finches.. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 291(2019). View this article in WRRO
- Assessing and improving the veracity of international trade in captive-bred animals. Journal of Environmental Management, 354, 120240-120240.
- Predator‐induced shape plasticity in Daphnia pulex. Ecology and Evolution, 14(2). View this article in WRRO
- Wildlife farming: balancing economic and conservation interests in the face of illegal wildlife trade. People and Nature, 6(2), 446-457. View this article in WRRO
- National spatial and temporal patterns of the global wildlife trade. Global Ecology and Conservation, 48, e02742-e02742.
- Global hotspots of traded phylogenetic and functional diversity. Nature, 620(7973), 351-357. View this article in WRRO
- Association of reproductive traits with captive‐ versus wild‐sourced birds in trade. Conservation Biology, 37(4). View this article in WRRO
- The ecological drivers and consequences of wildlife trade. Biological Reviews.
- Mixed protection of threatened species traded under CITES. Current Biology, 32(5), 999-1009. View this article in WRRO
- Protecting habitats in low-intensity tropical farmland using carbon-based payments for ecosystem services. Environmental Research Letters, 16(11). View this article in WRRO
- Economically viable forest restoration in shifting cultivation landscapes. Environmental Research Letters, 15(6). View this article in WRRO
- Impacts of wildlife trade on terrestrial biodiversity. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 5(4), 540-548.
Preprints
- Agroecological transition delivers win-win outcomes for people and nature, Springer Science and Business Media LLC.
- India’s agroecology programme, ‘zero budget natural farming’, delivers biodiversity and economic benefits without lowering yields. Nature Ecology & Evolution. View this article in WRRO
- Professional activities and memberships
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Member of the British Ecological Society
Trustee for Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust