Biodiversity underpins food production and access to clean air and water. Human population growth threatens biodiversity because of changes in land use. Grasslands and forests are being cleared for growing food, cities are becoming more crowded and agricultural land is more intensively managed. Such changes reduce the space left for nature, which also makes it harder for biodiversity to survive extreme weather events, which are likely to become more severe and frequent in the future. One of society’s greatest challenges is to find a way to balance space and resources for both humans and biodiversity. Research meets this challenge by investigating how land management and climate change impact biodiversity and what will happen in future. I use large-scale ecological datasets to analyse biodiversity responses to land-use and climate change. These analyses form the basis of spatial and temporal projections of biodiversity under different possible pathways of human development. Much of my work previously has focused on bees – important pollinators of many food crops and wild plants – to help understand the effectiveness of management decisions.