Do protected areas work? Tracking resilience and functional diversity change to investigate the impacts of anthropogenic stress

Ecosystems provide a plethora of benefits to humanity, and consequently maintaining and promoting biodiversity remains a key societal challenge.

Protected areas are used as a key conservation tool to safeguard biodiversity in the face of global anthropogenic change. However, the efficacy of protected areas in maintaining the resilience and functioning of biodiversity remains unclear.

This project will combine large datasets and advanced analytical tools to quantify the efficacy of protected areas in maintaining the resilience and functional diversity of ecosystems.

Resilience - the ability to resist and recover from disturbance - can tell us about the capacity of natural systems to withstand the impacts of perturbations.

Functional diversity - the range of roles and functions maintained by species within a community - can tell us can tell us what functions will persist following species extinctions.

Understanding whether protected areas are promoting these two metrics is crucial to gauge whether protected areas are fit for purpose in our changing world.

This project will analyse the International Waterbird Census and Christmas Bird Count databases, supplemented with data from the Living Planet Index Database.

These databases are comprised of yearly counts of animal populations, primarily birds, at tens of thousands of sites worldwide.

They will be used to: (1) Assess whether populations in protected areas are more resilient than those in non-protected areas, (2) assess whether protected areas show higher levels of functional diversity change through time, and (3) use population data to predict the risk of population extinction and model how this may affect the functional diversity of sites around the world.

We strongly welcome students with their own ideas and interests in this area of study, and are very happy for the student to develop their own research questions within the broad fields outline above.