Fully-funded PhD - Ecoacoustic monitoring of biodiversity in human-modified tropical forests

Tropical forests are biodiversity hotspots, hosting over half of known species. However, forests are still being lost and remaining forests increasingly fragmented and subjected to anthropogenic disturbances including selective logging, fire and hunting, and the impacts of climate change. These changes, even subtle ones, can lead to cascading impacts on biodiversity. For example, hunting can lead to local extinction of large-bodied frugivorous birds and mammals, leaving structurally intact yet defaunated forests missing key ecological functions like seed dispersal for large-seeded plants.  

Studying biodiversity in tropical forests is hard, and the diversity and cryptic nature of many species means even basic data on species occurrence is lacking, but monitoring is vital to inform conservation. Passive acoustic monitoring methods have emerged as a novel toolkit for monitoring tropical forest biodiversity. This project will use passive acoustic monitoring to assess the biodiversity value of human modified forests in two continents. Networks of passive acoustic monitors have/are being installed across gradients of human modification in Brazil, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and this project will assess whether soundscape responses to human modification of forest are consistent across socio-ecological contexts, with opportunities for the successful candidate to take part in tropical fieldwork.

Project aims and objectives

The overarching question concerns how soundscapes change across land-use gradients in different socio-ecological contexts. This will inform whether biodiversity responses to landscape (such as regional hunting pressure) and local (such as forest structure) factors are consistent in human-modified forests in three socio-ecological contexts.

The project will answer this overarching question by breaking it down into the following sub-questions:

• How do undisturbed baseline soundscapes vary between regions?
• How do soundscapes change across land-use gradients, and is this change context-dependent?
• How do soundscapes relate to functionally important aspects of biodiversity?