PhD: Abundance within species’ ranges: understanding species’ responses to environmental change
Location: Sir Clive Granger Building, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK.
At present, I am completing a PhD in Geography/Macroecology at the University of Nottingham, UK. My project focuses on abundance centres within species’ ranges and the effects of climate change and human-derived environmental degradation. The project aims to overcome several limitations surrounding the abundant-centre hypothesis using high quality data derived from the novel sPlot database. My research interests are multidisciplinary spanning the broad areas of ecology, conservation and bioinformatics. I am particularly interested in learning about new methods and technologies to answer ecological questions.
Prior to Nottingham, I studied ‘MRes Ecology and Conservation’ at the University of Brighton where I worked in partnership with the University of Veterinary and Pharmaceutical Sciences Brno in the Czech Republic. My masters research centred on winter movements of the near threatened Red Kite across western Europe using GPS/GSM telemetry, filling important knowledge gaps for this period of the year.
During my undergraduate degree also at the University of Brighton I completed a one-year research placement at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in London. There I worked within Kew’s Americas Team specifically on the ‘Tropical Important Plant Areas in Bolivia’ project and qualified as an IUCN Red List Assessor; working towards Red List assessments for endemic dry forest Bolivian plants. My undergraduate research project concentrated on the use of open-source biological occurrence data within species extinction risk assessments and the effects of different levels of data cleaning.