Native biodiversity in human-impacted habitats: Applying NGS technology to arthropod assemblages in semi-natural and plantation oak woodlands.

The conservation and enhancement of biodiversity in woodlands are recognized internationally as integral processes for sustainable woodland management, and action to sustain woodland biodiversity in Britain is mandated within the Natural Environment and Rural Communities and Nature Conservation acts. However, development and evaluation of woodland management strategies aimed at sustaining and enhancing biodiversity are restricted by a lack of reliable, efficient biodiversity assessment methods. Thus, effectiveness of biodiversity protection measures, including those built into forest certification schemes, is frequently poorly understood and not third-party verifiable. Metabarcoding promises to provide a rapid, efficient biodiversity sampling technique that could contribute to better-informed woodland management and conservation planning. It is cost-efficient because samples comprising many species (eg mixed arthropods from pitfall traps) can be sequenced for less than 200 pounds/sample, providing resolution of constituent species at 85% accuracy.
The aims of this project are: 1) The student will lead in developing a rapid, inexpensive, fully auditable, and standardised prototype method to assess levels of woodland biodiversity using DNA metabarcoding techniques, seeking to achieve this by focusing in the first instance on a) ground-dwelling arthropods as a hyper-diverse sample group with sensitive taxa known to respond rapidly to environmental change, and b) generating metabarcoding-based biodiversity estimates in a range of semi-natural, plantation and experimental oak-dominated (Quercus robur and Q. petraea) woodland settings, along gradients of stand structural and compositional complexity. Oak woods are highly valued conservation priority semi-natural woodlands, but also widespread and commercially important woodland plantation types. 2) The student will conduct spatially-explicit analyses of biodiversity to understand how ground-dwelling arthropod species richness, functional diversity and redundancy vary in semi-natural compared with plantation oak woodlands across GB, considering regional variations in adjacent land use, climate, biodiversity, and topography. Sampling of semi-natural oak woodlands of conservation importance will contribute to setting region-specific benchmarks of ground-dwelling arthropod diversity in oak woodland.
3) Using a blocked experimental design, the student will investigate the influences of different tree species on native ground-dwelling arthropod biodiversity in compositionally diversified oak woodland plots at the Gisburn Experiment in northwest England. Established in 1955, Gisburn planting trials were originally set up to investigate effects of monoculture and mixed -species plantings on forest productivity. 4) Using predictive modelling, the student will extrapolate observed patterns of arthropod biodiversity to unsampled areas of similar oak woodland in GB and to predict future distributions under climate change. A map-based approach will provide visual guidance for forest practitioners and policy makers.
The University of Aberdeen (UofA) will lead the project, with Forest Research, an agency of the British Forestry Commission (FC), as its industrial partner. This partnership will ensure efficient knowledge exchange with the most relevant stakeholder bodies and access to the best sampling sites and woodland datasets. Outputs of the study will be directly incorporated by FC managers and passed on to other stakeholders to improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of woodland biodiversity management and compliance with policy. The study will directly advance NERC strategic priority areas: supporting biodiversity and nature's services, meeting society's needs, and managing environmental change.