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Adam Fell
 
I have a special interest in understanding how animals are responding to an ever-changing world. And in particular, their behavioural responses to habitat changes. My previous research has seen me study the social interactions and behaviour of orphaned chimpanzees in Uganda to assess the likelihood of these individuals forming a troop hierarchy similar to their wild counterparts.
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For my master’s thesis, I explored how the foraging ecology of the red-tailed tropicbird in Mauritius is affected by changes in climate and assessed their energetic costs during prey encounters using onboard accelerometers. The ongoing development of tracking technology is another interest of mine and is something which I think will continue to help advance our understanding of animal behaviour.
 
For my PhD project, I will be focusing on understanding how forest fragmentation affects bird behaviour in the tropical landscapes of Panama. Currently very little is known about how birds disperse and shift movement patterns with regards to habitat fragmentation. Something which seems pretty vital to understand, given that large populations of humans depend solely on ecosystem services produced by tropical forest species e.g. seed dispersal and pollination. Therefore, this project will aim to track multiple frugivorous bird species with state of the art GPS loggers to better understand their movement patterns across a deforested landscape gradient.  We predict that species life-history and morphological traits will interact with landscape composition to determine dispersal among the different habitats. This information can then be used to assess the seed dispersal potential of frugivorous birds and the likelihood of deforested landscapes undergoing regeneration through natural succession.

Position:  PhD Student, University of Stirling

Supervised by: Dr. Daisy Dent (University of Stirling) and Prof. Steve Willis

Membership: Dent Lab - Tropical Forest Ecology and Conservation

Contact Details: Adam.fell@stir.ac.uk
Education

2019 - Present PhD Bioscience, University of Stirling
2018 - 2019      MRes Biosciences, Swansea University
2015 - 2018      BSc Zoology, Swansea University