Pre-industrial phenological baselines for UK birds

About the Project

Supervisors: Dr Deepa Senapathi, School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, University of Reading & Dr Ken Norris, Natural History Museum

This collaborative studentship is potentially funded by the University of Reading as part of a strategic partnership to support innovative collaborative research between the University and the Natural History Museum.

Subject to open competition to identify the strongest applicant across four eligible projects*, the successful applicant will be jointly supervised by both organisations.

There is growing evidence of changes in the timing of important ecological events, such as flowering in plants and reproduction in animals, in response to climate change with implications for population decline and biodiversity loss. In Europe, wild birds are commencing egg-laying earlier than they did in the recent past, which appears to be the result of warmer spring temperatures. This can have a detrimental ecological impact, if earlier egg laying results in a mismatch with peak prey abundance, reducing reproductive success and causing population declines. 

Our current understanding of phenological changes in wild birds is based largely on contemporary data from the last 40-50 years. This coincides with the period of accelerated warming that occurred from the 1980s onwards. The absence of older data means we lack the deeper time perspective we need to contextualise the rate and magnitude of these contemporary changes. As several authors have noted, historical baselines would be incredibly valuable in addressing these gaps in our understanding, enabling a much more complete picture of phenological responses to climate change to be developed. 

A deeper time perspective is possible using phenological data from historical egg collections, but until recently this was prohibitively difficult because of the time it would take (often several years) to extract the data from physical records (record cards, notebooks). These constraints are being transformed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision (CV), so that it is now possible to extract the data from thousands of records in just a few months. As a result, it is now feasible to reconstruct historical phenological baselines for wild birds. 

Aims and Objectives

Our main aim is to use the egg collection at the Natural History Museum in Tring to develop pre-industrial phenological baselines for as many UK bird species as possible. To do this, we will address three specific objectives: (1) further develop and refine AI/CV approaches to extract phenological data from ~100k record cards relating to ~200 plus UK species from the egg collection held by the Natural History Museum in Tring, (2) use the resulting data to produce historical baselines on the timing of egg laying in UK birds covering a window of about 200 years, and (3) compare these baselines with contemporary data to estimate the rate and magnitude of phenological change and understand drivers of variation between species. 

There will be considerable opportunity for the student to be actively involved in developing the work, particularly with respect to AI/CV and data extraction from the egg collection; and the ecological analyses of the resultant phenological data. The student will require training in working with historical collections, AI approaches and data analysis. This will be provided by the wider supervisory team.

*The other three potentially funded projects are:

Friend or Foe: microbe-plant interactions in agriculture

Nature-based interventions for human and planetary health: what works, for who, under what conditions?

Deciphering the Cambrian explosion of echinoderms

Eligibility

Applicants should hold or expect to gain a minimum of a 2:1 Bachelor's Degree, Master's Degree with Merit, or equivalent, in ecology, environmental science, mathematics, computer science, physics, biology, or a closely related environmental or physical science. 

We will also consider candidates with different academic paths but with experience acquired from a research position, or equivalent, that is relevant to the topic of the PhD project.

Due to the nature of the funding, this studentship is only open to candidates from the UK/Republic of Ireland.

How to apply

To apply, please complete an online application for a PhD in Ecology and Agri-Environmental Research. Please upload a CV and Cover Letter with your application.

When applying, if the application system prompts you to submit a research proposal, please paste in the project title and move on to the next step in the application. When the system asks about funding, please enter 'Studentship DRC24-003c' in the relevant box.

Enquiries

For enquiries, please contact Deepa Senapathi at g.d.senapathi@reading.ac.uk or Ken Norris at k.norris@nhm.ac.uk

Funding notes

- Starts September 2024
- Duration of funding: 3 years
- Studentship includes tuition fees at the UK/Republic of Ireland level, plus an annual stipend paid at the UKRI minimum level (£18,622 for 2023/24, the level for 2023/24 is awaiting confirmation)