Douglas Houston

I am primarily interested in understanding how human activity and environmental change affects biodiversity and ecosystems services in tropical and sub-tropical ecosystems.

I am currently a PhD researcher in the School of Environmental Sciences at University of East Anglia, and a member of the Critical Decade for Climate Change Doctoral Scholarship program, sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust. My PhD investigates the rates of carbon absorption and biodiversity accumulation in regrowing (secondary) tropical forests in the western Amazon.

My professional life up to 2021 was in the pharmaceutical industry, coordinating the conduct of clinical trials in NHS hospitals. However I reconnected with my primary passions for biodiversity and conservation on a holiday to eastern Indonesia, inspired by Alfred Russel Wallace's travelogue The Malay Archipelago. After witnessing the threats from industrialisation to forests, orangutans and birds of paradise, I decided to pursue a career in ecology and conservation science.

In 2022 I obtained an MSc in Conservation Biology at the University of Kent, where I used a novel ecological modelling program to simulate orangutan dispersal through a landscape of forest fragments and oil palm plantations in west Kalimantan, Borneo.