Lindsey Gillson’s research concerns the implications of landscape dynamics for biodiversity conservation and sustainability. She integrates palaeoecological techniques with other forms of long-term data to understand ecosystem dynamics at decadal to millennial timescales.

This knowledge is then combined with insights from neo-ecology and stakeholder participation to understand how current patterns and processes have been shaped by climate change, people, disturbance and land-use. This holistic understanding of landscape change includes knowledge of how people have shaped landscape and how they use them today.

In turn, knowledge of landscape trajectories, stakeholder perspectives and complexity can help in envisioning future scenarios, using simulation and modelling to explore the effects of multiple interacting drivers on biodiversity and ecosystem services in the future.

Lindsey applies this past-present-future perspective to various aspects of landscape management and conservation, including:

• restoration
• rewilding
• management of fire
• conservation of cultural landscapes 
• the sustainable management of ecosystem services

Lindsey Gillson completed her Bachelor's degree in Pure and Applied Biology at the University of Oxford, and her MSc in Environmental Technology at Imperial College, London.

She returned to Oxford for her DPhil research on savanna ecology and continued as Trapnell Fellow in Terrestrial African Ecology. She then moved to the University of Cape Town (UCT), progressing from Lecturer to Professor in Plant Conservation Biology and broadening her research interests to a range of African ecosystems and conservation challenges.

At UCT she was Deputy Director of the Plant Conservation Unit and served on various committees including the Committee of Assessors, Animal Ethics Committee and the Environment and Management Committee. 

She became Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity and Professor of Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York in 2024.