Dr Charles Hackforth

I'm an insect ecologist primarily interested in hyperdiverse tropcial ecosystems. I research trends and drivers of insect populaiton trends, and how the structure of interactions helps maintain this diversity. 

I completed my PhD at University College London, working in the Central Congo petland swamp forests to make first assessments of diversity for several insect taxa, and assessing the structure of interaction networks between nocturnal settling moths and flowering plants. Prior to this, I worked at STRI in Panama on using functional traits to describe and predict population trends for Arctiinae moths. 

In Bristol, I'm part of the PanTropIn project with the TropEco lab, which is looking at drivers and impacts of insect biodiversity changes across pantropical forests. We aim to establish a long-term biodiversity monitoring programme for a range of insect groups, assess the impacts of pollutants on tropical forest insects, and the compare the structure of ecological networks across continents via iDNA metabarcoding.