February 8, 2025

A bat monitor is located above the track at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London

A smart monitor at London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park records bat activity.Source: Duncan Wilson

When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Leeds, UK, I volunteered to help with a bat-conservation study. Someone posted a small common pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus is a species of flowering plant), the smallest bat species in the country, in my hand, and it was love at first sight.

I have always been fascinated by nature. Growing up, I wanted myself to be a cross between David Attenborough and Indiana Jones: Dr Jones, wildlife adventurer! But it was during my university module on bat ecology that I knew I had found my way.

These days, my research focuses on the interface between ecology and human health, and I use bats as a springboard to investigate some of life’s big questions. For example: how can we design cities in a way that is sustainable for people and nature?

Bats are amazing. They are also strange – have many characteristics that are not common among mammals. Take their life: there are bats that live for about 40 years, while a mouse of the same size lives an average of 18 months.

The fact that bats can defy the rules of evolution really helps illustrate how much we don’t know about ecology and the wider world we live in. longevity, metabolic stress, flying and more.

As one of the academic leads for University College London’s (UCL) new campus — UCL East, in the city’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park — I’m helping to design facilities with ecology in mind. I also lead the new People and Nature Lab there, which will focus on these themes and use a lot of data to explore new questions: how much nature do we need, for example?

We placed echo sensors in specially erected bat boxes around the Olympic Park. The idea is that if we can understand the health of bat populations in our cities, then we can better understand the health of the environment as a whole – healthy bat populations indicate good biodiversity. We also plan to introduce thousands of sensors in two new buildings on the UCL East campus, to help determine, in real time, the impact of buildings on the environment and vice versa.

Each bat monitor picks up the soundscape of its environment — that is, the collective sounds made in an environment, including human noises, birds and insects — through an ultrasonic microphone. The data is processed and turned into a spectrogram, a visual representation of the frequencies of different audio signals. With the help of artificial-intelligence specialists, we can capture the sounds of individual species and interpret them, look at changes over time and even map population trends.

Bats were the starting point of my research into infectious diseases. Part of the reason why they can live for such a long time is because they have developed effective mechanisms for DNA repair; they are also good at fighting viruses because their immune system is always there. This means that the viruses that bats have are adapted to their super immune systems – and if the viruses are transferred to other animals or people, we are in big trouble.

My work aims to understand what drives the transfer of pathogens from animals to human populations using large-scale models that look at socio-economic drivers, climate change and biodiversity. In 2008, I published a paper with Peter Daszak, a zoologist at the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization in New York City, about using spatial modeling to identify urban areas of infectious disease. disease, and how it relates to the natural environment.1.

Kate Jones looks up while using equipment to record bat acoustics in a river in Thailand

Kate Jones listens to bat calls.Credit: Alanna Collen

That research laid the groundwork for more detailed studies mapping urban biodiversity and predicting where disease outbreaks might occur. A study I worked on in 2020 highlighted the impact of human development and biodiversity loss on such outbreaks.2. We analyzed 3.2 million records from ecological sites across six continents and found that, as the landscape changed from natural to urban, populations of bats and other known mammals which hosts pathogens that can be transferred to humans increased.

Take Lassa fever, which is spread by rats. We found that their habitat has changed due to human changes in land use and climate change3. That creates areas where humans and rodents come into constant contact — the urine and feces of rodents get into plants, for example, and cause outbreaks. I am currently working on more sophisticated models and thinking about how to predict Lassa fever spikes.

Protecting the natural environment while incorporating it into urban spaces is essential to sustaining human and planetary health. Our work at UCL East builds on the ‘one Earth, one health’ principle: human health, sustainable development, climate change and biodiversity are interdependent. This means we need to take a more holistic approach to managing ecological systems. At its heart is an attempt to consider what future universities will look like; if we are to solve some of society’s biggest challenges, we need cross-disciplinary research and creative thinking.

Ecologists and architects need to talk to each other about the design of our cities — having concrete spaces with separate green parks and conservation areas is not the way forward if we want to reduce urban heat-island effect and flood risk. We need to think about sustainable drainage solutions — building resilience into the system with designated floodplains, and designing urban areas to include more trees and vegetation. It can also provide natural shade to help cool buildings as we face higher temperatures.

We still have a lot to learn about the role of trees in reducing air pollution, too: historically, we haven’t designed cities with that in mind. Another big part of the People and Nature Lab is linking ecology to urban areas: not preaching from an ecological pulpit, but working with architects to effectively put ecology at the center of the transformation of urban.

For these same reasons, we want to build interdisciplinarity at UCL East – physically incorporating it into the buildings by having open, flowing spaces that the local community can use for events and interactions . It builds on the legacy of maintaining the park, which was built for the London 2012 Olympics.

The ground floor of One Pool Street, our campus building which will open in late September, is deliberately open plan, removing standard departmental silos. At the People and Nature Lab, we have a rooftop field that is open to everyone to enjoy. I published a paper last year that looked at the positive effects of forests on young people.4, but the link between community mental health and the environment has only recently been explored. The United Kingdom is currently legislating biodiversity targets for businesses and cities, but we won’t know if we’re meeting those targets if we don’t monitor them. Better citizen engagement in understanding how to monitor the environment is essential.

East London is a very special place. It’s very diverse, with people from all socio-economic backgrounds, and that’s something to watch out for. I want people who might not come from an academic background to be able to walk into UCL East, see what’s going on and feel included. I’m proud to work in a place that thinks about things.

Through cross-disciplinary projects, we are actively nurturing a new generation of urban ecologists as well as architects and city planners, who can come together to solve the biggest biodiversity challenges.

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