Can novel approaches to farming benefit wildlife as well as livestock productivity?

Background:

Improving the environmental sustainability of farming is a major global challenge. Britain’s departure from the Common Agricultural Policy’s subsidy system post-Brexit, together with the Government’s 25 year plans for Food and Farming, and for the Environment, offer unprecedented opportunities for change. This project will work with farmers who are employing novel management techniques in efforts to improve productivity and long term viability of farmland, and will integrate with a major BBSRC-funded project “Sustainable economic and ecological grazing systems - learning from innovative practitioners” led by Dr. Lisa Norton at the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

Pastoral systems are the largest sector of UK agriculture and a vital component of our natural capital. Yet compared to arable systems, where declines of iconic bird species, and concerns about the use of neonicotinoid pesticides have galvanised public interest, the environmental sustainability of pastoral systems are under-explored. This project will study three management options which these systems employ to enhance productivity and soil condition — high density ‘mob’ grazing, the use of floristically-enriched swards, and more targeted use of antiparasitic agents (anthelmintics) — and will assess their impacts on ecosystem service delivery. The focus of the PhD will be on bats, as high-tropic level consumers, and their invertebrate prey, but will also be informed by additional data collected by the wider project on a variety of other ecosystem services including soil carbon storage, soil biodiversity, cattle health and plant diversity.

Aims:
To investigate the impact of cattle management strategies on bats, their invertebrate prey, and their delivery of ecosystem services.

Objectives:
1. To assess the impacts of i) mob grazing; ii) florally-enriched pasture; and iii) exposure to anthelmintic agents excreted in cattle dung following alternative treatment regimes, on the abundance of flying invertebrates, larval and adult dung flora, and on soil-dwelling macroinvertebrates.
2. To assess, using GPS tracking and acoustic surveys, the fine-scale use of the farmed landscape by greater horseshoe bats, in order to quantify i) the relationship between stocking density and bat activity; ii) any preference for pasture with livestock currently present compared with recently grazed pasture; iii) any preference for floristically enriched pasture compared with controls; and iv) changes in foraging activity after cattle treatment with anthelmintic agents.
3. To model the impact of increased localisation of grazing into discrete concentrated patches on bat foraging resource availability and energetic balance.
4. To assess, using meta-barcoding, the dietary composition of bats using study farms and hence quantify their contribution to ecosystem services (pest species consumption etc.) and dis-services (e.g. consumption of pollinators and dung decomposers).
5. To contribute to the overall assessment of the ecosystem services delivered by alternative cattle management systems.

Person specification:
The ability to communicate effectively with a wide variety of people, including farmers, the general public, and research scientists is essential. Data collection may involve night work as well as time working away from the university unsupervised. We are therefore looking for candidates who are reliable and have a positive attitude to field work. Candidates need to be able to drive or have other means of reaching study sites, and be available to begin data collection from June 2018 at the latest.

Ideal candidates will have a strong background in biological science, with additional experience of geographical information systems, statistical modelling and/or epidemiology. Eligible candidates will have recently received an MSc and/or a First or high 2:1 BSc in a relevant subject. Candidates for whom English is not their first language will require an IELTS score of 6.5 overall, with not less than 6.0 in any section.