Establishing past biodiversity baselines to guide UK wetland and freshwater nature recovery

Summary

A fully-funded PhD studentship including UK fees, annual stipend, and a research budget, is available at the University of Bristol to develop historical and palaeoecological baselines for conservation purposes in the Somerset Wetlands National Nature Reserve. Study will begin in September 2025 and is funded for three years. The deadline for applications is 10th February 2025. 

Project background

The restoration of British natural landscapes through species reintroductions and the reinstatement of lost ecological roles is an increasingly widespread paradigm for environmental management. However, to be planned and implemented effectively, this approach requires coordinated interdisciplinary assessment of long-term environmental archives to establish a series of key baselines: how past ecosystems differed from today; the ecology and environmental requirements of lost species; and when, how and why biodiversity change took place. Understanding past environmental states and the dynamics and drivers of change is particularly important for guiding management and restoration of the UK’s degraded freshwater ecosystems, which represent key carbon sinks and provide essential ecosystem services, but which have experienced severe anthropogenic modification and degradation throughout recent millennia. The project will identify and integrate different available archives for key freshwater systems to reconstruct their local environmental histories, with a focus on a national-priority wetland area, the Somerset Wetlands ‘super’ National Nature Reserve, and its associated river drainage systems.

Project aims and methods

This project will explore the conservation information-content of diverse archives, including fossil and zooarchaeological bone and palaeoecological proxy records, 18th-20th century museum specimens and pre-modern historical source texts concerning freshwater resources, e.g. manorial and parliamentary records. It will assess how these baselines can be used to reconstruct biodiversity and landscape change across Britain’s freshwater systems through the Holocene (11,500 years ago to present). Key questions will address the extent to which these systems have changed from postglacial baselines, how they have responded to natural environmental change and human actions across the Holocene, and which components of biodiversity have varied in their vulnerability or resilience to external change over time. These approaches will be used to establish predictive insights about likely wetland responses to future climate change scenarios, across multiple scales (from components of biodiversity to landscape-level system change). 

The project will also investigate the past status and ecology of regionally extinct or threatened native British wetland species, for example the curlew, common crane, unionid bivalves, shining ram’s horn snail and the European eel. These taxa are currently the focus of discussions around conservation or potential reintroduction, but key aspects of their past distribution, landscape use and environmental requirements in Britain remain unknown, hindering effective national conservation planning. 

The project will deploy ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) on bone assemblages excavated from the Somerset Wetlands NNR area and housed in museum and other collections. This emerging method of peptide mass fingerprinting will be used to test for the presence of (previously) cryptic species, using fragmentary material that cannot be identified on the basis of traditional morphology. The project will make a distinctive contribution to method development in terms of building new reference libraries for aquatic vertebrates, notably fish, amphibians and wetland birds. The project will also determine the past occurrence and local extinction histories of diverse species across the Somerset Wetlands NNR and associated river catchments, to reconstruct past distributions of breeding populations and their changes over time, correlated with independent available historical data on changing local patterns of wildfowling and fishery effort and landscape modification to identify likely extinction drivers (with associated evaluation of whether these drivers still persist within key landscapes). These approaches will be used to inform restoration and management goals needed for these species to become re-established in the UK.

The project will establish a crucial new evidence-base to guide restoration of Britain’s critically depleted wetlands and their biodiversity, and will serve as a template for best-practice integration of historical baselines into modern landscape management within a “conservation palaeontology” framework. Environmental archives also vary hugely in information-content and in data quantity, quality and accessibility; the project will also explore and evaluate the potential of different archives to provide useful insights into past ecology, exploitation and loss of biodiversity, and their resultant capacity to guide modern conservation planning for British wetlands.

Candidate Requirements

This project provides an excellent opportunity for students interested in palaeoecology, Quaternary vertebrate or invertebrate palaeontology, biogeography and nature restoration. The ideal candidate will have a strong background (preferably MSc level) in a related discipline, such as physical geography, geology, zooarchaeology, science-based archaeology, ecology or environmental science, as well as a strong interest in conservation science and historical data regarding past biodiversity. Experience of taxonomic identification of (sub)fossil or zooarchaeological (non-domesticated) material, integration of multiproxy environmental data sources and wet chemical laboratory methods would be highly beneficial. Good written and oral communication skills are required, as is the ability to work independently and in a team. For International students, English Language IELTS scores of at least 6.5 (no less than 6.0 in any element). We welcome and encourage student applications from under-represented groups. We value a diverse research environment.

Training

The student will be trained in taxonomic identification of vertebrate and/or invertebrate fossil material, as well as in the evaluation of diverse historical data sources and archives. This project will provide training in cutting-edge laboratory methods for ZooMS on bone assemblages and contribute towards methodological development of the technique. The project also involves Natural England’s Wessex National Nature Reserve (NNR) Team as CASE partner in developing the evidence base needed for nature recovery in the Wessex Landscape. The student will be embedded in the NNR team and spend time with conservation practitioners and reserve managers, disseminating their research and learning how best to apply it in the context of the Somerset Wetlands and more widely.

The student will be encouraged to participate in personal development courses to develop technical and personal skills essential for a successful scientific career. Opportunities to present at conferences will be actively supported. 

For further information or informal enquiries, please contact [email protected]. Please apply to “Geographical Sciences (Physical Geography)” here.