Treescapes and the city: Do wooded networks enhance bird movement in urban areas?

The project looks at the configuration of urban habitats, such as the connected green infrastructure and gaps in green space, and how this impacts avian species. The chosen study species is the common blackbird that lives in both rural and urban environments and is amenable to collecting data required for this project. The project collects data from fitting blackbirds with tags, tracking their location and movement in the environment. Alongside these geopositional data, data regarding habitat type, activity budgets, behaviour and general biometrics from the tagged birds will also be collected. Across the duration of the PhD, the research will look at avian habitat preference and how barriers to their movement such as noise, artificial light at night and urban infrastructure are impacting this species as an archetypal urban bird. This will establish how living in cities influences the movement through, and use of, green corridors by what is popularly considered to be an urban-adapted bird species. The project aims to understand how green space is used by common bird species and thereby to inform how our cities of the future should be designed for the shared benefit of human and non-human species.