Georgina Mace

Professor Georgina Mace CBE FRS is Professor of Conservation Science and Director of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Centre for Population Biology, Imperial College, London.

She is the winner of the 2007 International Cosmos Prize.

Professor Mace was instrumental in the IUCN Red List, the most comprehensive inventory on the status of many species which is important in assisting in species conservation making the maintenance of global biodiversity much easier. This raised public awareness and its underlying concept and principles have spread throughout the world. Now, many national and local governments as well as academic societies have their own Red Lists. International cooperation is vital today because the actions of one country can easily influence the biodiversity of another. She also was instrumental in developing the Criteria for Listing Threatened Species as chair of the Criteria Review Working Group, Species Survival Commission, International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN).

She was actively involved in the “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment” which was conducted from 2002 through 2005. In this report Professor Mace warned that 12% of birds, 25% of mammals and about 30% of amphibians were endangered, and that, given the ongoing scale of human activities, 10 to 20% of natural resources could be lost by 2050.

Currently, Professor Mace is joining with other researchers to publish a series of theses on such topics as establishment of a method for evaluating biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides, and changes in biodiversity that have been provisionally measured by the Red List Index.

In July 2007 she was awarded an Honorary D.Sc by Sussex University for her work on biodiversity.

External links

* [http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/cpb/ NERC Centre for Population Biology]
* [http://www.expo-cosmos.or.jp// International Cosmos Prize]
* [http://www.iucnredlist.org// IUCN Red List]
*worldcat id|lccn-n91-128788