E5 DLA: Forecasting population dynamics of hole nesting birds under climate change

Are you an ecologist with a strong quantitative background, an interest in responses to climate change, prediction, and modelling? Then this project might be for you!

This studentship will answer: how can we predict population dynamics in the face of directional climate change? It will use hole nesting birds as a case study to quantify weather influences on demography, paving the way to generate robust and reliable predictions of future population changes in response to climate change.

The climate is changing rapidly, causing knock on impacts for biological populations. Determining how and why biological populations will change is vital for foreseeing potential negative climate change impacts and enabling protection of biodiversity. One key step for achieving this is to characterise and quantify the role of weather conditions (realisations of climate) as drivers of population demography. Despite an assumed importance of climate change for functioning ecosystems studies explicitly linking climate/weather variables and demography, have produced mixed results with some suggesting a strong impact of weather conditions (Burgess, 2014; Simmonds et al., 2020) whereas others finding little signal (Compagnoni et al., 2024) or highly variable results Paniw et al., 2021). In order to develop meaningful predictions of population change in response to climate change, we need to improve our understanding of how weather/climate influences population demography across large spatial scales. This PhD will address this key knowledge gap using an exemplary collection of hole nesting bird data sets from across the UK (held by SPI-birds).

This project will be supervised by Dr Emily Simmonds, Dr Hannah Froy, and Dr Jarrod Hadfield. 

Possible research questions

There are opportunities for the student to determine the specific research questions and topics to be covered but general questions include:

1. How do we identify biologically plausible weather-demography links from observed data?
2. What is the mechanism of weather influence on population change, is it directly through vital rates (survival/reproduction), trait mediated (through phenology or body size), or through changes in resource availability?
3. To what extent is the demography of hole-nesting birds weather/climate driven and does this vary across space/species range?
4. How does the inclusion of weather drivers in demographic models alter predictive success in space and time?

Training you will receive:

This project will provide a wide range of subject specific skills as well as transferrable skills. This will be supported by a comprehensive training programme (through support from supervisors and select NERC training courses), including:

–      Ecological knowledge: life history theory, population dynamics, species responses to climate change.

–      Statistical analyses: Bayesian modelling (including integrated population models), predictive population modelling (with propagated uncertainty), simulation studies, and the use of ecological forecast horizons.

–      Coding in R: data manipulation, statistical and mathematical analyses.

–      Data and code management: version control through GitHub.

–      Presentation skills (written, oral, and visual).

Requirements:

Candidates should be highly motivated with a strong interest in ecology, demography, population dynamics, and/or responses to climate change (essential). They should have some experience of coding and modelling in R (essential) and be able to demonstrate a background of using quantitative analyses (desirable) and a keenness to learn.

Candidates must have a degree in a relevant area (essential), but further experience in a relevant discipline can also be considered.

Further details and how to apply can be found here

APPLICATION DEADLINE – 6 January 2025 at 12:00 noon, GMT