As in humans, animal vocalisations carry emotional, physiological and individual information about an animal’s state and its responses to its environment. Suggesting that they can serve as potentially useful non-invasive indicators for inferring both wild animal welfare and the condition of the environments they inhabit. Modern sound analysis techniques now provide tools to discriminate, analyse and classify specific vocalisations and vocal patterns allowing them to be used for monitoring welfare of different farm and laboratory animals. This PhD aims to apply these principles and use passive acoustic monitoring of the vocalisations of wild bird populations to explore how the welfare of wild animals changes in different areas and explore how these changes in vocal signatures across different populations can be used as an environmental monitoring tool. This will be used to indicate the impacts of different environmental conditions on wild animals.
The project will use bird populations subject to different population regulation pressures (in urban, rural and conservation areas around Liverpool) to identify vocal patterns and chorus characteristics related to different environmental risks such as starvation and predation risk, and human disturbance. Restricted access to food, reduced body condition and increased predation risk are considered negative experiences according to the Five Domains Model of animal welfare and result in negative states that consequently reduce overall welfare over time. These factors similarly reflect poor environmental conditions, while birds are known for being good indicators of the health of their environment and respond rapidly to changing conditions in the quality of their (and our) environments. During this PhD the student will use analysis of wild bird vocal patterns to develop and test indices of welfare and environmental quality that will allow us to compare the quality of each habitat and provide relevant information for conservation monitoring and management decisions.
For this work you will focus on some of the most common bird species in the UK; the house sparrow (Passer domesticus), blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus), robin (Erithacus rubecula) and blackbird (Turdus merula) and use them as model species to validate this welfare and environmental monitoring approach for the first time across wild populations. Validating acoustic monitoring as a tool for both non-invasive welfare and environmental monitoring in the wild will provide the basis for future applications of acoustic monitoring to birds in general, providing a method that could be used to monitor welfare of wild birds and the quality of their environments at any location globally.
The PhD student will join our flourishing School of Biological & Environmental Sciences, at Liverpool John Moores University and work under the supervisory team of Dr Luiza Passos and Dr Ross Macleod. The PhD research will involve significant amounts of personal fieldwork in urban and rural environments around the Liverpool area, to collect sound recordings of birds with both Audio Moth automatic sound recorders for recording whole bird communities and hand held microphones for recordings of specific individuals. In addition, there will be significant periods of computer based work, processing and analysing the sound recordings using the latest acoustic analysis software (Raven Pro and Koe).
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