Carsten Meyer

This PhD opportunity at Durham University investigates how global bird communities are changing under land-use and climate change. The project addresses an important challenge in biodiversity science: bird monitoring data are often unevenly distributed and may not represent environmental changes across the wider regions where monitoring takes place. The doctoral researcher will link bird survey time series from three continents with environmental change data. The work will assess whether monitored locations are representative of broader regional environmental change, examine how uneven representation influences estimates of biodiversity change and environmental-driver effects, and develop methods to reduce representation bias. The project will also apply these approaches to policy indicators and contribute guidance for biodiversity assessments. The researcher will build expertise in biodiversity science, programming, spatial data analysis and ecological statistics, while having opportunities to shape the research and engage with people producing policy-relevant biodiversity indicators. Supervision will be provided by Gary Powney , Rob Boyd and Carsten Meyer . The project is based at Durham University in collaboration with the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology , providing an environment connected to ecological monitoring, global change research and applied biodiversity assessment. The advertised opportunity is a 3.5-year PhD for 2027 entry funded through the Iapetus DTP studentship competition.