Small island ecosystems are among the places most visibly threatened by global environmental change. Sea-level rise, warming oceans, altered disturbance regimes, invasive species, and resource extraction all threaten the persistence of island biodiversity and the human communities that depend on it. Yet islands are also places where local ecological processes can have unusually large effects. In this talk, Dr. Young will explore how restoring ecological connectivity and native species interactions in small island ecosystems can increase resilience to global change.
Drawing on long-term work in tropical atolls, she will show how island restoration can do more than protect biodiversity: it can help maintain the physical persistence of islands themselves. Dr. Young will argue that atolls offer a powerful model for understanding local resilience to global environmental change. While local restoration cannot substitute for global climate action, it can alter the sensitivity, recovery capacity, and persistence of ecosystems facing global stressors. More broadly, small islands reveal a general principle: when ecological interactions are restored across land, sea, and air, local management can amplify nature-based resilience in ways that are mechanistic, measurable, and potentially transferable to other coupled ecosystems.

About the Speaker: Hillary Young is a community ecologist in the department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Young received a B.A. degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. She then received an M.A. in Environmental Management at Yale University where she focused on applied forest management questions. Her PhD in Biology at Stanford University examined cascading effects of changes in plant communities on whole ecosystem and community structure. As a postdoctoral researcher jointly affiliated at Smithsonian Institution and Harvard University she examined the impacts of anthropogenic disturbance on mammal communities and ultimately, on zoonotic diseases.