Paul Leadley has been a Professor at the Université Paris-Sud, Orsay since 1997. He obtained a PhD in ecology in 1993 (San Diego State University & University of California, Davis, USA).
His research activities focus on: 1) the impacts of global change, particularly those of climate change and of increasing CO2 levels on ecosystem functioning and plant diversity in terrestrial ecosystems; 2) the interactions between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning; and 3) the modelling of nutrient competition between plants as well as rhizosphere interactions between plants and soil micro-organisms.
At the international level, Paul Leadley has been involved in various scientific research programmes: Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems, Global Land Project, and DIVERSITAS (International Biodiversity Programme). He is currently the Coordinator of the bioDISCOVERY project of DIVERSITAS that focuses on improving the science of biodiversity assessments, monitoring and scenarios. Paul Leadley co-ordinated the Biodiversity Scenarios Report “Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO3)” for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), published in 2010, and participated in the establishment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES); he is also one of the lead authors of the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report.
At the national level, Paul Leadley is a member of the scientific steering committee of the Foundation for Biodiversity Research (FRB), the French National Alliance for Environmental Research (AllEnvi), and a regional program for interdisciplinary research on global change (GIS “Climate, Environment, Society”).
