Linking land use to bird community dynamics through functional trait approaches.

In other world regions such as the tropics, much less resolved data are available, despite the urgent requirement for evidence-based approaches to guide environmental management. Most of the world's biodiversity is found in these regions and they also have the highest rates of land-use change. The student will analyse such an Afrotropical dataset, comprising, interpolated presence-absence data, trait data averaged by species or interpolated using phylogenetic relationships. This will require the development of new analytical approaches linking global land-use and climate change to ecosystem functions. Crucially, the student will develop validation approaches to quantify uncertainty by using the same simplified methods on the well resolved datasets and conducting sensitivity analysis on predictions. In addition, the student will devise new methods to test the suitability of using phylogenetic diversity as a proxy for functional traits, where the latter may be absent for other species groups.
The project will pave the way to a clearer methodological framework for understanding land-use impacts on biological communities and associated ecosystem function in data poor scenarios. The outcome will be a set of innovative methods which can link land use to community composition and ecosystem function, which will also be applicable to other species groups.