James Pearce-Higgins is Director of Science for the British Trust for Ornithology with responsibility for providing strategic leadership of the science of the organisation. During the last decade, his research has focussed particularly on documenting the impacts of climate change, projecting future climate change impacts, and informing climate change adaptation. In 2014, Cambridge University Press published Birds and Climate Change: Impacts and Conservation Responses, written with Rhys Green. James worked for the RSPB from 1999-2010 where he led a range of projects on upland birds, and prior to this completed a PhD at the University of Manchester on Golden Plovers, supervised by the late Derek Yalden.