Quantifying the impact of marine renewables to UK seabird Populations
Population demographics are a lynchpin of conservation assessments and practical actions to preserve wildlife from extinctions. For many reasons biologists and decision makers are often confronted with a lack of data or empirical estimates of population processes, adding noise and uncertainty to analyses and potentially misleading results. For example excluding connectivity such as immigration and emigration from an evaluation of wild populations may fail to capture source-sink dynamics, misidentifying risk and misguiding subsequent conservation strategies.
This project uses time-series data fitted to hierarchical state space population models in a Bayesian framework to quantify demographic processes. The main aims of this work are to capture uncertainty in current understanding of seabird demographics, specifically in the context of density-dependence and environmental stochasticity and provide evidence for and estimation of connectivity between populations. Fundamentally the outcomes, we hope, will highlight those seabird populations, that due to their dynamics, are most vulnerable to decline from anthropogenic activity.
Researchers
Funding
NERC CASE partnership funding with MacArthurGreen