Olof

Olsson

PhD

Researcher (Centre affiliate)

olof.olsson@su.se

+46 8 674 77 48

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Profile summary

  • Resilience
  • Interdisciplinary research
  • Management
  • Marine ecology
  • Seabirds
  • Man and the biosphere

Olof Olsson is a strategic advisor and researcher

Olsson is currently working at Folkuniversitetet.

Olsson has worked closely with the centre’s leadership on organizational issues. His research focuses primarily on marine ecology, including research seabirds and marie ecoystems in the Baltic Sea and in polar areas.

Olsson holds a PhD in population ecology from Uppsala University (1995), with a thesis on king penguins’ breeding and feeding ecology at South Georgia in the Southern ocean.

Olsson was managing director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre between 2009 and 2019. He was interim CEO at EAT in Oslo parts of 2019 and 2020 and interim director at Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) parts of 2018 and 2019.

Between 2003 and 2008, he worked as programme director at Mistra (the Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research) where he coordinated funding and evaluation of programmes focusing on natural resources management. He also led Mistra’s work on generating new ideas and intelligence work.

Prior to his work for Mistra, Olsson have worked at several nation research councils in Sweden and for the Swedish Government Office as senior advisor to the Environmental Advisory Council (Miljövårdsberedningen).

Publications by Olsson, Olof

Global COVID-19 lockdown highlights humans as both threats and custodians of the environment

Journal / article | 2021

Bates, A., Primack, R., Biggar, B., Bird, T., Clinton, M., Command, R., Richards, C., et.al. 2021. Global COVID-19 lockdown highlights humans as both threats and custodians of the environment. Biological Conservation. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109175

The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundreds of reports of unusual species observations from around the world suggest th...

COVID-19 lockdown reveals tourists as seabird guardians

Journal / article | 2021

Hentati-Sundberg, J., Berglund, P.A., Hejdström, A. and Olsson, O. 2021. COVID-19 lockdown reveals tourists as seabird guardians. Biological Conservation, p.108950. Vancouver. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2021.108950

The widespread lockdowns put in place to limit the spread of the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) offers a rare opportunity in understanding how human presence influence ecosystems. Using data from long-term seabird monitoring, we reveal a previously concealed guarding effect by tourist groups on an iconic seabird colony in the Baltic Sea. The absence of tourists in 2020 lead to a sevenfold increase in presence of white-tai...

A mechanistic framework to inform the spatial management of conflicting fisheries and top predators

Journal / article | 2020

Hentati‐Sundberg, J., Olin, A.B., Evans, T.J., Isaksson, N., Berglund, P.A. and Olsson, O., 2020. A mechanistic framework to inform the spatial management of conflicting fisheries and top predators. Journal of Applied Ecology.

Conflicts of interest between resource extraction and conservation are widespread, and negotiating such conflicts, or trade‐offs, is a key issue for ecosystem managers. One such trade‐off is resource competition between fisheries and marine top predators. Managing this trade‐off has so far been difficult due to a lack of knowledge regarding the amount and distribution of prey required by top predators. Here, we develop a fram...

Effects of back‐mounted biologgers on condition, diving and flight performance in a breeding seabird

Journal / article | 2020

Evans, T.J., Young, R.C., Watson, H, Olsson, O., Åkesson, S. 2020. Effects of back‐mounted biologgers on condition, diving and flight performance in a breeding seabird. Journal of Avian Biology, Volume 51, Issue 11, November 2020, https://doi.org/10.1111/jav.02509

Biologging devices are providing detailed insights into the behaviour and movement of animals in their natural environments. It is usually assumed that this method of gathering data does not impact on the behaviour observed. However, potential negative effects on birds have rarely been investigated before field‐based studies are initiated. Seabirds which both fly and use pursuit diving may be particularly sensitive to increase...