Christine, Phil and Steve have published a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, working in collaboration with researchers from Imperial College London, St Andrews University and BirdLife International. The study combines species distribution models and bio-physical models of bird flight range to predict how climate change will affect the migratory journeys of 77 European migratory bird species. They found that long-distance migrants will likely have to travel further in the future, as their suitable breeding and non-breeding ranges both move towards the poles. As a result of this, 37% of migratory journeys undertaken by long-distance migrants are predicted to require an additional stopover in future. This will mean that migratory journeys will occur over longer time-periods, making species more susceptible to threatening processes during these journeys, such as predation and poaching.

!Meanwhile, Tom has published a new paper in Conservation Letters , led by Jeremy Cusack and colleagues at the University of Stirling, as part of a large international collaboration. The paper explores five case-studies of conservation conflict involving large grazing bird species and agriculture across northern Europe. They discovered that changes in management effort (harvesting, compensation and scaring) are often asynchronous with changes in bird populations, likely due to time-lags between population monitoring and management, and inconsistent use of predictive models. This study highlights the need for more timely management responses to tackle conservation conflicts. You can find out more about the paper here and here.
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This paper follows on from Tom's recent study in the Journal of Applied Ecology, with colleagues from the universities of Stirling, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, which revealed how land-use and climate change can shape the ecological contexts of conservation conflicts. They focused on the Scottish island of Islay, where a growing population of Greenland barnacle geese cause serious economic damage to farmland. They found that both improvements to pasture through fertilizer use and increasing temperatures have boosted goose population growth. This illustrates the value of exploring socio-ecological history to understand the processes leading to conservation conflict, by identifying elements of conflict that are controllable, such as local habitat management, and those that are less controllable, such as climate change, but which both need to be taken into account in predictive management models.

Phil has recently published 2 new papers in the Journal of Applied Ecology:

Along with other Senior Editors of the journal, he co-authored this year’s editorial: “On the extinction of the single-authored paper: The causes and consequences of increasingly collaborative applied ecological research”.  This paper notes the continuing decline of single-authored papers in the journal, in common with a wide range of fields.  The editors argue that the increase in multi-authored papers is likely to be associated with both benefits and challenges.  Benefits include that papers are frequently greater in geographic scope and scale, that they are often more interdisciplinary, and that author lists tend to be more inclusive and more international.  Multi-author papers are more likely to be accepted and there is some suggestion that they are also more likely to be cited.  At the same time, there are challenges - not least those associated with frameworks for assessing researcher outputs, which often discourage working in large networks.  Author recognition is an area that will require further consideration if larger networks - and the benefits they deliver - are to thrive in applied ecology.

Along with co-authors, Phil also published a policy direction on “Making rewilding fit for policy”. This paper considers the many definitions of rewilding, as well as the many different approaches to it, including Pleistocene, trophic, ecological and passive rewilding.  The authors argue that the “re” of rewildling should not be interpreted as inevitably returning the ecosystem to some previous state; nor should the “wild” of rewilding inevitably exclude humans as part of an ecosystem.  The key to rewilding should be that the system achieves a state of good ecological functionality, with minimal requirement for management to support that functionality.  The authors identify an array of research needs which will need to be met before rewilding can be fully integrated into the management toolbox.  They argue that environmental policy instruments that focus on maintaining prescribed communities might actually hinder the implementation of rewilding initiatives.

Congratulations to Tom Mason, Stuart Brooker and Nicolas Fuentes-Allende who all won prizes for their posters at the department of biosciences research away day. See links below for the winning posters!

Congratulations go to both Lucy Gardner and Harriet Newhouse for being awarded their Research MSc.

Lucy’s thesis investigated the extent to which parameters are available to produce population viability analyses for the world’s birds under future climate change scenarios, with a particular fopcus on estimating population sizes.

Harriet’s thesis highlighted priority conservation sites for ecotourism using data from wildlife tourism guidebooks and tours to evaluate the species that motivate ecotourism, and using this information to simulate hotspots for wildlife-based tourism, both now and in the future.