My overall thesis title will be something like “Understanding the annual cycle of migratory movements of the common shelduck, and the risks posed by offshore wind farm developments“, but I’ll do lots of seperate smaller pieces of research to produce that overall understanding. Each chapter of my thesis (highlighted below) will investigate a different element of the migratory cycle, to build up a picture of when, where and how common shelduck, and other waterfowl species, interact with offshore wind farms.
Chapter 1 – Migration vulnerability assessment framework
I’ve developed a framework that can be used to assess the vulnerability of any migratory species to any spatially explicit anthropogenic pressure (e.g. collision risk or barrier effects), which can be created by various obstacles in the migratory pathways (e.g. wind farms, fences, fishing nets, tidal turbines, buildings, power cables etc.)
My team and I have tracked 57 shelduck on migration between breeding and moulting sites, from five UK populations.
The GPS tags have collected high resolution data on cross-sea migration routes and interactions with offshore wind farms.
We’ve collected shelduck feathers from all over northwest Europe, and I’ve analysed their stable isotope content in order to understand where non-breeding birds conducted their moult.
Chapter 4 – Population trends and proportion of population crossing seas each year
I’ll combine all BTO monitoring datasets for shelduck to quantify how many are migrating over sea areas annually. I will then be able to use this in combination with the outputs from previous chapters to assess how many shelduck may interact with offshore wind farms each year.
Image taken from BTO Trends Explorer.