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PhD studentships
Each year IEB (along with its sister institute, IIIR) receives about 8 PhD studentships from the UK research councils to support postgraduate study for UK Nationals. Some University-funded studentships are also available for non-UK students, and there may be additional studentships for specific projects. EU and overseas students wishing to conduct postgraduate research at IEB are strongly advised to seek funding sources in their own country.
I am not offering any studentships for 2010 as primary supervisor. However if you are interested in the following project on the Rum red deer study, please apply to Josephine Pemberton.
Impacts of red deer on plant community mosaics
Across Scotland, red deer are currently being culled in order to bring important upland plant communities into favourable condition according to criteria laid down by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee1. But red deer range widely, and the relatively large spatial scale at which we manage them is radically different from the finer spatial scales over which plant communities vary, forming mosaics. Since free-ranging red deer have strong preferences for different plant communities and different plant communities require different levels of herbivory, it is not clear whether any specific population density of a wild herbivore can simultaneously maintain all the different plant communities within a mosaic in favourable condition.
This project will build on previous work2 to investigate the relationships between deer density, deer impacts and plant community ‘condition’ using a mixture of analysis of long-term datasets and an experimental approach, with the well-studied plant communities and deer population of the Isle of Rum as a core study site3. The study will address a number of key questions:
- On the smooth grasslands that are strongly favoured by deer, what is the relationship between grazing intensity and vegetation condition?
- How do the relative impacts on different communities within a mosaic change with deer density?
- How are relative impacts affected by patch-size and neighbouring patch identity?
- What alternatives to deer culling exist for fine-scale management of particular plant communities?
The project will be an opportunity to conduct research on plant-herbivore interactions in the context of one of the most intensely-argued issues in Scottish land management4, and to influence the course of conservation practice.
References
1. http://www.dcs.gov.uk/jointwork/Section%20Content/The%20Programme.aspx
2. Virtanen, R., Edwards, G.R., & Crawley, M.J. (2002) Red deer management and vegetation on the Isle of Rum. Journal Of Applied Ecology, 39:572.
3. http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/zoostaff/larg/pages/Rum.html
4. Clutton-Brock, T. H., Coulson, T. and Milner, J. M.. (2004) Red deer stocks in the Highlands of Scotland. Nature 429:261-262.
Postdoc opportunities
I have no positions available at present, but am happy to discuss possibilities for postdoc work. Possible funding routes are via training fellowships (e.g. EU Marie Curie fellowships, Royal Society Incoming International Fellowships) for which I act as a sponsor, or by putting together a grant application with you as a named postdoc.