We seek to solve critical issues in the spatial ecology of pelagic seabirds, apex predators of earth’s greatest and least under understood ecosystem, the marine environment. Utilising and developing miniature bio-logging technology, coupled with advanced computational analysis, my research group (oxnav.zoo.ox.ac.uk) tackles fundamental questions of behaviour, ecology, and conservation in a range of auks and procellariiforms that breed off Britain and around the world, many of which are threatened or endangered by climate change and other anthropogenic influences. The student would engage in field-research on remote island breeding colonies, using state-of-the-art on-board telemetry systems, and advanced analytical techniques, to investigate emerging questions concerning the mechanisms of seabird migration, navigation, distribution, and life-history evolution, with the exact topic strongly influenced by the student’s interests and by the questions emerging from the most recent research discoveries.
