Undergraduate Summer Research Project
Title: Building a species-level database of bird migrations
Supervisor: Adam Kane
This funded project will begin in July 2021 and last for 4 weeks. Funding will be provided by the SFI Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science.
Closing date is Friday 18th June and applicants should send a cover letter (max 1 page) and CV (max 2 pages) as a single PDF file to (opens in a new window)adam.kane@ucd.ie. Please note your experience with databases, literature reviews and ornithology.
Each year 20% of the world’s species of birds move vast distances as they migrate. Despite this mass movement we have a poor understanding of the distances involved. Climate change and resultant phenological mismatch have been shown to alter migration distances in a sample of species and as such it is vital to have basic data for comparative work. In this project you will conduct a literature review to assemble a database of bird migration cataloguing aspects such as body mass, distance travelled and classification.
Further reading
(opens in a new window)http://www.groms.de/
Visser, M. E., Perdeck, A. C., Van Balen, J. H., & Both, C. (2009). Climate change leads to decreasing bird migration distances. Global Change Biology, 15(8), 1859-1865.