PhD in ornithology (UK)

Together with the British Trust for Ornithology, we are advertising a funded PhD on the impact of urban noise on bird breeding success. This project aims  to (1) quantify the impact of urban noise on breeding success of ten common breeding birds, on a national scale. This will be combined with (2) field experiments that aim to optimise the noise metric that best predicts impact on birds. Noise data is usually reported in dBA, which is optimised for human perception, but which may not be appropriate for animals since they are likely to perceive noise differently from humans. This will provide a noise metric that reports noise in a way that is relevant to animals and will involve one season of fieldwork on birds involving playback experiments to test their perception of different sounds. This will culminate in the construction and validation of a predictive model for the impact of urban noise on bird distribution. Data generated in objectives 1-2 will provide the parameters such as breeding success under different noise regimes, abundance and a noise-metric to construct a predictive model for bird distribution by noise level. This predictive model will allow policy makers, conservationists and urban planners to assess the impact of urban noise on biodiversity.

The deadline for application of this funded PhD is November 16 (next week!) and the advert can be found here: http://www.findaphd.com/search/ProjectDetails.aspx?PJID=68090&LID=1837

The application procedure is subject to an internal competition, where depending on the quality of the applications, 3 out of 5 will be funded.

We would appreciate it if you could forward this PhD advert to anyone you think may be interested. It is highly recommended that applicants contact Selvino de Kort (s.dekort@mmu.ac.uk) prior to submission.

Many thanks and best wishes,

Selvino

Dr SR de Kort
Senior Lecturer in Animal Behaviour
Conservation, Evolution and Behaviour Research Group
Division of Biology and Conservation Ecology
School of Science and the Environment
Manchester Metropolitan University
T: 0161-2471195
http://www.ceerec.mmu.ac.uk/ceb/

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