BES deeply saddened by death of Georgina Mace

We are deeply saddened to hear the tragic news of Professor Dame Georgina Mace’s passing. Georgina was a visionary conservation ecologist and a leader in documenting global biodiversity declines. Between 2011 and 2013 Georgina served as the first female president of the British Ecological Society and was also awarded honorary membership.

One of Georgina’s lasting legacies is her work on defining the scientific criteria for assigning species a category of threat in the IUCN Red List. By coordinating efforts to define the ecological parameters of extinction risk, Georgina helped transform the list from experts’ subjective recommendations, to the world’s most comprehensive information source on the global extinction risk on more than 120,000 species.

Throughout her career Georgina continued working on documenting biodiversity declines and developing tools to implement science-based policies in order to combat this loss. Most recently she contributed to the scoping for the IPBES Global Assessment in 2019, acted as overall Review Editor.

As well as serving as president of the British Ecological Society, Georgina also held positions throughout her career as President of the Society for Conservation Biology, Chair of the DIVERSITAS global environmental change program, Director of the NERC Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College London and Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems at University College London, founding its Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research.

Our deepest condolences go out to her family and friends.