Together with the British
Trust for Ornithology, we are advertising a funded PhD on the impact of
urban noise on bird breeding success. This project aims to (1) quantify
the impact of urban noise on breeding success of ten common breeding
birds, on a national scale. This will be combined with (2) field
experiments that aim to optimise the noise metric that best predicts
impact on birds. Noise data is usually reported in dBA, which is
optimised for human perception, but which may not be appropriate for
animals since they are likely to perceive noise differently from humans.
This will provide a noise metric that reports noise in a way that is
relevant to animals and will involve one season of fieldwork on birds
involving playback experiments to test their perception of different
sounds. This will culminate in the construction and validation of a
predictive model for the impact of urban noise on bird distribution.
Data generated in objectives 1-2 will provide the parameters such as
breeding success under different noise regimes, abundance and a
noise-metric to construct a predictive model for bird distribution by
noise level. This predictive model will allow policy makers,
conservationists and urban planners to assess the impact of urban noise
on biodiversity.
The deadline for application of this funded PhD is November 16 (next week!) and the advert can be found here: http://www.findaphd.com/search/ProjectDetails.aspx?PJID=68090&LID=1837
The
application procedure is subject to an internal competition, where
depending on the quality of the applications, 3 out of 5 will be funded.
We
would appreciate it if you could forward this PhD advert to anyone you
think may be interested. It is highly recommended that applicants
contact Selvino de Kort (s.dekort@mmu.ac.uk) prior to submission.