How does climate modify the response of biodiversity to land use?

Project Background

Two major research questions for ecology and biodiversity science are: 1) How do responses of biodiversity to land use depend upon present climate and past climate change? 2) How does the interaction with climate change affect predictions about how biodiversity will respond to future land use? This project will seek to provide answers at a global scale.

Human land use and climate change are among the greatest threats to biodiversity. Large-scale models have been applied to understand the global effects of each pressure in isolation (e.g. Newbold et al., 2015; Thomas et al., 2004), but understanding of interactions between the pressures is poor. This PhD project will address these interactions, particularly investigating the role that climate plays in altering the effects of land-use change on biodiversity. Previous high-profile predictions of the effects of land-use change on biodiversity (e.g. Newbold et al., 2016) have ignored the effect that climate and climate change might play in moderating the effects of land use.

One previous global-scale study investigated this question (Mantyka-Pringle et al., 2012). However, this study considered only a coarse classification of whether or not biodiversity responded negatively to land-use change and so could not consider effects on different facets of biodiversity and could not quantify the extent to which biodiversity loss in the face of land-use change will be more or less severe given the existence of climate change. Another study (Frishkoff et al., 2016) at a much smaller scale showed that species that persist in agricultural land use are those associated with drier climates. However, because this study focused on a small study area and on birds, it was unable to test for variation in the reported effects among geographical regions or among groups of species.

The project will involve statistical modelling of the response of biodiversity to land use, using an existing database (Hudson et al., 2014), taking into account the effect of climate and past climate change, and will consider variation in the results among geographical regions and among groups of species. Technically, the work will include a combination of spatial analysis (using Geographical Information Systems) and statistical analysis (using R).

Skills Required

The successful student is expected to have a background that includes modules in ecology or conservation, and ideally some experience of statistics in R (or other software). Experience of geographical information systems would be useful, but is not essential.