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Harry Roberts

I am a MBiol student at Somerville College. My Master’s research investigates the use of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to detect the drought state and species composition of a plant community. Plants release a high diversity of chemicals into the air, and the resulting VOC profiles vary with species composition and environmental conditions. If the ecological signals they encode can be disentangled from one another, airborne VOCs could represent a valuable, underexplored source of ecological information. Through greenhouse experimentation and field sampling, I am investigating the extent to which VOC signals associated with drought and community composition are detectable in isolation, separable from one another, and ultimately recoverable from the chemical profile alone.

My wider biological interests are broad, encompassing conservation, restoration ecology, freshwater ecology, palaeoecology, ornithology and agroecology, but they centre primarily on understanding and measuring biodiversity and ecological change. I have a particular interest in emerging biodiversity monitoring technologies, such as eDNA and bioacoustics. The potential for such passive monitoring to be combined into autonomous, scalable, multimodal sensing stations, with the ability to diagnose an ecosystem’s ‘health’, could substantially improve our capacity to detect, and respond to, environmental change. Ultimately, my research aims to contribute towards VOCs being integrated into such monitoring systems.