A warm welcome to this year's cohort of MBiol project students!

I am interested in understanding the factors that influence phenology, in particular tree growing season length. My MBiol project will focus on the cross-seasonal variation in deciduous tree phenology. In this project I aim to gain a better understanding of how climate, species, and individual variation impact growing season length. To investigate this I will use high-resolution drone data from across multiple years to quantify growing season length. By examining this variation in growing season length I aim to provide new insight into how climatic variables influence growing season length and the timing of different phenological events which will help us to better understand how this phenological season will change in the future in response to climate change.

I am excited to spend the next year studying microhabitat selection as a form of behavioural plasticity in great and blue tits, researching whether, and how, the thermal characteristics of nest-site choice may buffer the impacts of climate change. This project will combine long-term nestbox occupancy and visitation records with short-term temperature logger data to examine the potential for behavioural responses to fine-scale thermal variation in Wytham Woods.

In particular, I aim to investigate whether great and blue tits select nest-sites non-randomly with respect to thermal microclimate, whether these choices are behaviourally plastic across years, and whether the thermal characteristics of nest-site microclimate are linked to reproductive success. By doing so, I hope to better understand how fine-scale behavioural responses interact with the population-wide shift towards earlier reproductive timing observed over recent decades, and to explore a potential mechanism through which birds may respond to rising temperatures.

I am an an MBiol student and ornithologist interested in animal behaviour and its links to conservation. My Master's project, joint with the University of Vienna, is investigating foraging innovations in Galapagos Finches and how individual personality drivers as well as ecosystem-level changes can influence the propensity for novel behaviours to emerge and persist.

My MBiol project explores how natal environment influences phenotype and dispersal behaviour in Great Tits. In particular, I will look at how the breeding density at an individual’s natal site influences natal dispersal and settlement patterns. I will explore this using Great Tit breeding data from both the long-term monitored system in Wytham Woods and the density-manipulated plots in Bagley Wood.

In doing this, I aim to provide insight into what causes variation in dispersal patterns between individuals as well as the significance of natal conditions in contributing to environmentally induced plasticity. 

I am an Mbiol student investigating the influence of social context on individual personality in captive homing pigeons. Intraspecific differences in ‘boldness’ are commonly studied by assaying individuals in isolation, despite focal species living in social groups in their natural environment. Therefore, individual behaviour is determined in a non-ecological context, and the influence of group presence on individual personality remains poorly understood. The aim of my project is to investigate whether group size and group personality composition have an influence on individual ‘boldness’ in captive homing pigeons. I will assay neophobia and activity levels of focal pigeons, initially alone, then in groups of 3, 6 and 9, and lastly in ‘bold’ and ‘shy’ groups. I am hoping to develop a better understanding of how individual personality changes with social context – something relevant in natural populations when groups change due to mortality, immigration, and emigration. 

My MBiol project will focus on how social rank influences the transmission of social learning behaviours in homing pigeons (Columba livia). I will monitor gaze following behaviours that can provide insights into social learning, including the direction of a bird’s attention towards other individuals. The way in which social rank influences these behaviours has not yet been extensively studied in birds.

Gaze following can now be measured much more accurately, due to novel technology in the form of small, head-mounted biologging cameras. I will use these to monitor gaze following during a social learning task, to test if pigeons preferentially look towards certain individuals based on social rank. This will provide a more detailed understanding of how both gaze following behaviours and social learning are influenced by social rank in pigeons.