Multidimensional resilience of fragmented forest patch networks in temperate and tropical environments.

How resilient are forests to fragmentation? How can we manage networks of fragmented forest patches to increase their resilience? These are critical ecological questions as almost all forests in temperate and tropical systems have undergone fragmentation or are undergoing fragmentation currently.

There are multiple components of a forest’s ecology that we might desire to be resilient. For example, some studies have focused on the spatial population dynamics of mammals or birds and asked how viable and how resilient those populations are in fragmented systems? Other studies have asked how resilient the genetic diversity of a population is under fragmentation. Further work has considered how effective and resilient ecosystem services provisioned by birds, mammals or insects such as pollination or seed dispersal are when a forest becomes fragmented, and the consequent impacts on the status of tree populations and ecosystem functions such as carbon storage. Recent studies have begun to utilise satellite imagery to evaluate the health status of forests and this has included assessing the forests’ resilience to extreme weather events such as droughts and flooding.

Importantly, there are likely to be strong interactions between the different processes and forms of resilience highlighted above. For example, the population abundance of a key seed disperser may be heavily impacted by the reduced health status of the trees that provide a key food resource. In some cases this could result in regional extinction of key seed dispersers with long term impacts on the tree population dynamics, with implications for future forest health resilience. This project will seek to fill this gap by having a focus on multiple components of resilience and considering feedbacks between them. This is a broad area for research and within it there is considerable scope for a student to take the work in a direction that best fits their interests and skill set.

This project will take advantage of existing teams that the supervisory team are part of and that will provide opportunities for work on both temperate and tropical systems. In the UK, we will work with colleagues at Forest Research and make use of the WREN network of forest patches. The student will become a part of this network of researchers. The tropical component of this PhD project will be embedded within a large project recently awarded by NERC to a UK-Indonesian team. The PhD student will become part of this team alongside two postdoctoral researchers who are currently being recruited.

There will be the opportunity to conduct fieldwork in the UK and Sulawesi (where the UK-Indonesian project is based) to gather data to inform parameterisation and/or validation of the models.

We will provide the student with high-level training in ecological modelling, in remote sensing approaches (including using NDVI to assess forest health), and in fieldwork in temperate and tropical environments. This specialist training will complement the skills training that the student will receive as a member of a cohort of QUADRAT students.