Dr Alex Davey

Dr Alex Davey, Deputy Director of Science (Research)

My role encompasses strategically planning, leading and overseeing RBGE’s research to combat the biodiversity and climate crises in Scotland and globally, growing grant income, enhancing equity, inclusion and access, and working with external partners to ensure impact.

With field experience in South America, tropical Africa and Southeast Asia, my interests range from tropical biodiversity surveying, herbarium taxonomy and systematics, to molecular and morphological phylogenetics, palynology and palaeobotany, vegetation change, and threatened species restoration. I enjoy pushing the boundaries of traditional disciplines, working with artists, poets and social scientists to explore ways to analyse impact and raise awareness of global challenges such as plant extinction and habitat loss and their links to human health and wellbeing

My current research focuses around conservation prioritisation, drawing together synergistic outputs from our species- and habitat-level assessments. I am also working to develop our collaborative research, conservation and horticultural training in China, focused around our field station on the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain near Lijiang, Yunnan Province. I am developing programmes with colleagues in Edinburgh and Berlin, using interdisciplinary approaches to analyse the impact of botanic gardens at local, national and global scales in urban and rural environments.

I am also author of the book World of Plants, Stories of Survival which explores the role of botanic gardens in preventing plant extinctions.

Please get in touch if you would like to discuss possibilities for collaboration with, or dissemination of, RBGE’s science.

Follow me on Twitter @adavey_RBGE and @RBGE_science.

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