Rate My Professor Jonathan Gordon

Jonathan Gordon is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York. He completed a BSc in Geography at the University of Liverpool and an MSc in Environmental Archaeology at University College London before earning his PhD from the University of York in 2024. His doctoral research examined human-biodiversity relationships over the Anthropocene.

Gordon investigates the impacts of human development on biodiversity over the past 130,000 years, with a focus on past floristic diversity change and mammalian diversity since the last interglacial period. His work contextualises the current extinction event and considers future biodiversity trajectories based on the fossil record. Key publications include “Black Death Land Abandonment Drove European Diversity Losses” (Ecology Letters, 2026), “Increased Holocene Diversity in Europe Linked to Human-Associated Vegetation Change” (Global Ecology and Biogeography, 2025), and “Floristic diversity and its relationships with human land use varied regionally during the Holocene” (Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2024). In the Environmental Sciences faculty, his research specialisation is palaeoecology.