Professor Josephine Pemberton receives the British Ecological Society’s highest honour

Professor Josephine Pemberton has been awarded honorary membership by the British Ecological Society, for her research on wild animal populations which has led to ground-breaking insights into the natural world.

Honorary membership is the highest honour given by the British Ecological Society (BES), the oldest ecological society in the world, with 7,000 members from more than 120 different countries.

The award recognises exceptional contribution at international level to the generation, communication and promotion of ecological knowledge and solutions.

Josephine Pemberton is Chair of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, and receives the honorary membership alongside Professor Tim Clutton-Brock at the University of Cambridge.

Tim and Josephine have worked together on a project studying red deer on the island of Rum, in the Inner Hebrides, and their work continues to advance our understanding of the natural world.

Josephine is an evolutionary biologist who pioneered genetic parentage analysis in wild animal populations, leading to a broader understanding of how evolutionary processes work in the wild.

Long-term studies

Most of Josephine’s research, in the School of Biological Sciences’ Institute of Ecology and Evolution, has focused on two long-term studies of wild animals which she has been instrumental in running.

In these studies individual life histories of iconic animals on two Scottish islands - the Soay sheep of St Kilda and the red deer on the island of Rum - are recorded in detail.

Professor Josephine Pemberton - Image Credit: Douglas Vernimmen

These detailed, long-term studies of many individual animals provide deeper insights into the ecological and evolutionary processes that allow animals to adapt to their environment.

This level of monitoring is rare: most wildlife projects are short-term field studies that offer only a limited glimpse into the natural world – making these long-running projects globally unique.

Over the years, genetic analysis of tissue samples has revealed how the animal’s genes influence aspects of their lives and how genetic differences influence the whole population.

To gain these insights Josephine’s team built detailed pedigrees – vast family trees that show the relationships between all the animals since the start of both projects.

Two software methods her team developed to identify paternity and reconstruct pedigrees, CERVUS and SEQUOIA, have proved influential worldwide and are among the most widely used parentage identification programs in wild plants and animals.

These programs aid conservation efforts in endangered populations, allowing the design of effective breeding programs that avoid inbreeding. They are also used extensively in livestock breeding.

Rum Red Deer Project

Part of the population of around a thousand deer on island of Rum, on the west coast of Scotland, are the focus of the Rum Red Deer Project, one of the longest-running wildlife studies in the world.

The project, which reached its landmark 50th anniversary in 2022, has made the island world famous and transformed the understanding of red deer - an iconic species of enormous economic value to Scotland.

Since 1972, when the project was started by the University of Cambridge, each calf found in the study area in the north of island, has been is tagged, weighed, and sampled for genetic analysis.

The project, which has been run from the University of Edinburgh since 2008, ensures that every deer in the study area is identified by a code and then followed closely throughout his or her life.

Josephine Pemberton undertaking fieldwork on the island of Rum - Image Credit: Murdo MacLeod, The Guardian

The deer have been the subject of more than 170 scientific papers that have documented ground-breaking insights into mating behaviour, natural selection, aging in the wild and parasite infections.

The project has also led to a better understanding of how the deer are affected by climate change and has revealed dramatic changes in the timing of key life events, including earlier breeding.

These insights have informed deer management practices in Scotland and further afield, and have also helped scientists around the world to understand other similar wild animal populations.

The deers' lives have also become a focus of educational field trips to the island, and have been featured in TV wildlife documentaries such as the BBC’s AutumnWatch.

St Kilda Soay Sheep Project

The Soay Sheep Project, the sister project of the Rum Red Deer Project, has been running since 1985 and studies a unique population of Soay sheep living on the remote Scottish island of St Kilda.

The extremely resilient Soay sheep, a wild breed native to the UK, are part of St Kilda’s status as a double UNESCO World Heritage site.

Among the most genetically isolated sheep breed in the world, Soay sheep have been living unmanaged - evolving and adapting under natural conditions - on the island for thousands of years.

Using similar methods to the Rum Red Deer Project the team have undertaken continuous collection of information about individual animals including genetic parentage and life-histories.

The sheep are of interest beacuse their population dynamics differ from the deer and because it is possible to catch and measure their growth and condition easily.

This has enabled ground-breaking research into topics including population dynamics, evolution by natural selection, ageing, immunology and parasite infections in a natural setting.

The project is internationally recognised as one of the most important long-term studies of its kind in the world.

British Ecological Society Awards

Josephine is one of nine distinguished ecologists who have been recognised in the British Ecological Society (BES) annual awards and prizes for work that benefits the scientific community and society.

The winners will be presented with their prizes during a ceremony held at the BES Annual Meeting which runs from 10 – 13 December in Liverpool.

The meeting will bring together over 1000 ecologists to discuss the latest advances in ecological research across the whole discipline.

Biography

Josephine Pemberton gained a zoology degree from the University of Oxford. This was followed by a PhD in 1983 at the University of Reading, for research on the population genetics of fallow deer.

After her PhD, she was a postdoctoral researcher at University College London and the University of Cambridge.

She was appointed a lectureship at the University of Edinburgh in 1994, where she is now the Chair of Natural History.

Josephine is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Royal Society.

I am surprised and extremely flattered by this award. First, I feel it is recognition for the value of long-term studies of individuals. It is clear that the longer such studies run, the more we discover, and with the arrival of genomics this is truer than ever. Second, I may be the one getting the award, but these projects are team efforts and I want my colleagues to know how much I appreciate them. There are too many to name, but they know who they are. I would just like to highlight some extraordinary field workers: Fiona Guinness and Sean and Ali Morris have collected the majority of the 53-year time series on Rum, and Jill Pilkington has just stepped down after 33 years leading field work on St Kilda.