Context of the Research: Measurement of the distribution and abundance of marine mammals has been identified as one of the SOFI priority areas (SO14). This proposed studentship is specifically aimed at this objective but also takes the 'next step' in the assessment of these spatial data, by investigating how to use maps of marine mammal distribution and abundance to inform policy decisions, namely the development of offshore marine protected areas (MPAs). The development of offshore MPAs is increasingly advocated, particularly with the increasing demands on the marine environment, most recently due to marine renewable energy sources. However, there are currently few guidelines available as to how to base decisions on location, let alone size, and spacing of such protected areas. Different criteria are often suggested to guide the design of reserves but problems could be foreseen with many of these. For example, identifying MPAs based on hotspots of animal use might give priority to commoner species and neglect those that are of most concern (endangered or threatened species). Similarly, identifying MPAs based on high biodiversity (areas where the most species are found) may suggest protecting areas where species overlap, but due to avoidance between these species, these may be at the boundaries of their ranges and therefore represent only marginal habitat for them. Conducted in collaboration with the Sea Mammal Research Unit, this studentship will use their datasets on the distribution and abundance of seals and whales in UK offshore waters. This project aims to develop an ecologically-based computer framework for the design of offshore MPAs for marine mammals around Britain based on quantitative objectives, with the broader aim of providing a generic framework that can be used in other areas and for other species. Aims and Objectives: 1) To develop a model framework for the objective identification and design of offshore MPAs based on ecological first principles; 2) To inform the model with analysis of existing data on the abundance and distribution of marine mammals and human activities around Britain; 3) To investigate the impact of a range of different objectives and constraints on the resulting selections of MPAs; 4) To develop objective criteria that could ultimately be used to advise national and international policy on marine protected areas for wide ranging marine mammals. Potential Application and Benefits: The primary outcome of this project will be the assessment of priorities and constraints for offshore MPA design for marine mammals. This will be of primary interest to policy-makers and the major project deliverable to this community will be software for use in dynamic ongoing assessment and prioritisation of areas based on updates for species maps, population estimates and variations in anthropogenic risk. This software will also lend itself well to public exhibition, illustrating how management of the open ocean can be achieved. Within the Oceans 2025 community, this work is also likely to be of interest to the Sustainable Marine Resources theme, particularly elements concerning marine spatial planning and analysis of marine policy drivers to enhance decision-support. We aim to forge links with these researchers, and to feed the data and outcomes associated with this project into this broader analysis.

Landscapes are composed of multiple habitats as well as the biodiversity that resides within them, and are a product of interactions between species present, climate, geography and human use. They provide many ecosystem services, such as provision of food and water, regulation of climate and carbon cycling, which are vital for a stable future for our society, economy, health and wellbeing. Plants form the basis of all terrestrial ecosystems and are fundamental to providing these ecosystem services. Landscape decisions should therefore be underpinned by tools that enable prediction of plant responses to global change and landscape management. However, current approaches to modelling plant species distributions are deficient for this purpose as they focus on individual, or a small number of, species; ignore interactions between species; or only model a small number of plant functional types. A systems approach will be used to address this significant gap in current real-world landscape decision support by developing tools to predict (including uncertainty quantification) current and future distribution of all ~1,800 UK plant species in a manner that accounts for competitive interactions between species. This will enable effective assessment of the impacts of landscape decisions and/or climate change, e.g. in specific locations or on important habitat types such as peatlands. Invasive non-natives are considered a growing threat to ecosystem services and through extension to ~200,000 plant species worldwide this tool also enables assessment of the impact of invasive non-native plant species on current and potential future UK landscapes. Pests and diseases also represent a significant challenge and tools developed by this project will be a valuable resource for managing landscapes for plant health, for example, by providing distributions of at-risk populations - i.e. the distribution of plant hosts for any disease or pest of interest. Future work could explore the potentially critical feedbacks between the dynamics of plant community distributions and the transmission of pests and diseases by coupling models of these processes. This project builds on an existing coarse spatial scale model for all plant biodiversity on Earth and an ongoing NERC-funded project developing a higher resolution version for UK plant species. The latter project makes use of the more detailed climate, land use and plant coverage records available for the UK. However, further refinements are needed to properly quantify structural and process uncertainty within this framework. Without such work predictions of the effect of climate change and land use decisions that emerge from these models could be misleading. Currently niche preferences are parameterised by observational data with no uncertainty assessment. In terms of structural uncertainty, it is critical to account for between-species heterogeneity better by establishing how each species grows and reproduces (its functional type). Building on existing digitisation expertise at the Natural History Museum we therefore propose to extract relevant functional type information from existing taxonomic descriptions to create a more extensive trait database for all UK native and non-native plant species. As well as being a valuable resource in its own right and extensible to all global plant records, this work will be used within the project to enhance the simulation model to capture the relative differences in growth, competition and dispersal between species. Comparison with the current model based on a limited number of functional types will highlight the role of structural complexity and the impact of non-linearities on model output. We will also develop tools to quantify uncertainty in these models using available plant species distribution data so that we can correctly capture the impact of planned and expected land use and climate change, and ultimately guide future landscape decision making.

Many animal species have been transported across the globe by human activities. Some of these have become established and damage the species that naturally live in the area they invaded. Invasive predator species able to use a wide range of prey are particularly problematic and are held responsible for the extinction or catastrophic declines of some native species. If those native species are to be preserved, conservationists must intervene, often by actively removing individuals of the invasive species. Removing the last individual however is only possible on islands. Elsewhere, it will be necessary to continue controlling those invasive species for the foreseeable future. This is expensive and can only be done in areas selected for their conservation value, such as national parks or reserves. It is also important that conservationists learn to control those alien species as effectively as possible, so that the native species really benefit, but also in order to be able to protect as large areas as possible for a given amount of resources. Academic ecologists have been studying the interactions between predators and their prey. They have learned about the impact of that fragmenting habitats may have on the likelihood of species not causing the extinction of other species. Ecologists now realise that indirect interactions between two species mediated by a third species, may play an important role in the success and mitigation of invasions. They have also devised equations to predict how the rate at which a predator remove prey from a population varies with the abundance of a prey population. They have also gained a better understanding of the conditions that cause individuals to disperse away from the area where they were born. Our proposal is for a partnership between academic ecologists, conservationist and a users of wildlife resources that will use predator-prey theory and new empirical data to devise a science-based management strategy to safeguard populations of a protected and rapidly declining mammal, the water vole that is subjected to predation by the invasive American mink. The project will take place in the Cairngorms National Park, on the fringe of the uplands. First, we need to know how fast the number of immigrants arriving in an area where control has taken place declines, as this area is more distant from uncontrolled areas. This is important at it will tell us how large an area must be controlled to keep the mink population low in its centre. For this, we will remove mink from sections of rivers for a time and monitor recolonisation as it takes place. Second, we will consider how the success of trappers changes as mink become scarce. We will find out whether there is a density below which trappers are no longer interested in trapping or are ineffective. Given the different motivations of participant to the project, we will also find out whether groups of trappers will have different trapping success. Third, we will ask if the presence of rabbits in some valleys does subsidies mink populations that prey on them, and may then move on and prey on water voles elsewhere in a valley. This may result in rabbits and water voles not being found in the same valley, even though rabbits certainly do not eat water voles! If mink require rabbits to breed successfully in upland Scotland, concentrating mink control effort in those areas may be very effective. Finally, we will integrate our results in models that can be used to explore the relative merits of different management strategies including 1. Increasing the number of trappers that remain motivated and effective in trapping mink even when they are scarce 2. increasing the number of those trappers only in the centre of the area we wish to protect 3. expanding the area where mink are trapped downstream from the national park, even though fewer people are interested in trapping mink in those areas 3. controlling rabbits in key sites in the core area.

As well as being important in human and agricultural populations, it is increasingly recognised that infectious disease has important impacts in natural systems. In particular it is now clear that infectious disease can be important in conservation and may affect the ability of foreign organisms to invade natural communities. Ecological theory has been important in showing the general importance of disease in natural systems, but has only been rarely used to direct conservation programs. The project investigators have a track record in translating established research on disease-mediated ecological invasion into mathematical tools that can be used to direct conservation management decisions and policy. This project will answer current, pressing questions outlined by conservation agencies on the red-grey-squirrelpox system in Scotland. The objectives in the project have been specified by the project partners (Scottish Natural Heritage, Scottish Wildlife Trust) who need to know the potential impact of squirrelpox on remaining red squirrel populations, whether grey squirrel control can prevent squirrelpox spread and the critical locations and effort at which control is required. This information is essential to allow our conservation partners to formulate current and future management plans that allocates limited resources in a manner that maximises red squirrel protection. The modelling framework, which predicts temporal and spatial disease dynamics on large-scale, complex landscapes, is the best tool available to underpin these conservation efforts. Therefore, this NERC Innovations proposal provides a unique opportunity to translate established research into effective conservation strategies that provide direct tangible benefits to end-users.

Wildlife populations naturally experience a wide range of infections and disease. Understanding how they circulate in the environment, how they are evolving over time and how different hosts are affected is key to understanding both their impact on different animal species and their potential to spill-over into domesticated animals and humans. We are currently experiencing a major outbreak of Avian Influenza that is having a major impact both on wild birds and commercial poultry at a global scale. This is a disease caused by infection by a group of Influenza A type viruses of which water birds are the natural host. These viruses usually circulate in wild waterfowl and shorebirds with relatively little impact. However, the past year has seen a significant change in the impact of one particular subtype of avian influenza called H5N1. Mortality reports in wild birds have been highest in seabirds with over 200,000 dead birds reported over a three month period in Scotland alone. These are novel hosts that up until this point have been relatively unaffected so we currently lack information about how this disease is impacting in these novel host populations, hindering our ability to make informed decisions about any potential mitigation strategies that might be put in place or evaluate their likely success. In this project we have three main objectives. Firstly, we will track the evolution of the virus over time and space across a range of different host species. This will tell us about possible routes of transmission but also help us track how the virus is changing as it evolves and to identify any viral changes that may alter its pathogenicity or its ability to jump between species. Secondly, we will focus on the hosts and explore what proportion of birds are exposed and survive infection. We will do this in populations that have been monitored over many years so their individual life-histories, age, and migration routes are known to help us identify which whether particular parts of the population may be more vulnerable or more important in transmission. Finally we will use the data we are collecting to create a modelling framework that represents the wider population of different species to test how resilient different populations might be to this disease and to use as a tool to evaluate and prioritize potential mitigations that can be put in place to minimise any impact on host populations and limit future disease spread.