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Project title: Ecoinformatics: Maintenance and provision of ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes
Supervisors: Professor Mark Emmerson and Dr Jack Lennon.
Application deadline: Midnight, Thursday 23rd February 2012.
Applications are invited from Northern Ireland DARD-eligible students (see below for criteria) who are interested in modelling the scale-dependence of ecosystem service provision by hedgerows in rural and agricultural landscapes.
Hedgerows form multi-functional semi-natural wildlife corridors in much of the NI countryside. They provide a range of ecosystem services: their intrinsic biodiversity of plants, insects and small mammals, in agroecosystems they act as a reservoir of natural enemies of agricultural pests and of pollinators, and they have a major role in landscape connectivity per se.
Hedgerows are often interrupted by gaps and vary in vegetation composition and diversity. This imposes a break in habitat continuity for species associated with particular vegetation types. Somewhat counter-intuitively, diversity in a hedgerow may have a cost in that continuity of vegetation type is more interrupted by different species: the most obvious example is the occasional presence of large trees. More generally, isolation occurs at a hierarchical range of scales in hedgerow systems, from metres to field to landscape levels of organisation.
The goal of this project is to understand the role of spatial structure and connectivity in hedgerows in the maintenance of ecosystem services, particularly biodiversity. Isolation will be measured at multiple scales, from interruption in linear runs to distances between field margins to density of hedges at the landscape level. Biodiversity of vegetation and selected insect groups (particularly pollinators including Bombus spp., Lepidoptera spp.) will be sampled similarly and spatial turnover in composition will be modelled as a function of isolation. Modern spatial analytical methods will be used to address key questions such as:
- Which species benefit most from increased connectivity?
- What are the benefits/disbenefits of more diverse/homogeneous hedge vegetation structures?
- How large does a gap have to be to reduce biodiversity in isolated hedgerows?
- Given limited financial resources, what is the optimal planting strategy for closing gaps or reducing isolation and so maximising ecosystem service provision?
The skills needed for this project: (i) willingness to learn plant/insect identification as appropriate, (ii) interest in landscape ecology and biogeography, (iii) numerate (Maths A level standard, or willing to learn), willingness to acquire ecological modelling and analysis skills.
