What drives patterns of biodiversity in the Congo Basin?

The project sits within the Biodiversity Observatory and is part of the CBSI Science and Capacity Plan. The Observatory will support PhD and MSc students in the Catholic University of Congo and the University of Lubumbashi in DRC and the University of Stirling in the UK. Work on this PhD project will collaborate closely with the work of the other observatories and CBSI partners, particularly CENAREST in Gabon and the partner company Okala, which operates in Gabon, DRC and the UK and wider collaborative partnerships that the Observatory staff have established in the region.

The studentship will ask how different taxa are impacted by the major habitat modifiers of our time: forestry, agriculture, mining, roads and cities. First, we will build on recent surveys of biodiversity using camera-traps (terrestrial vertebrates), bioacoustics (birds, soundscape intensities), and eDNA (all taxa) as these are the largest sources of animal biodiversity monitoring data currently available. For example, approximately 20% of Gabon has been surveyed by camera-trap monitoring in the past 7 years and around 3-4% also surveyed with eDNA and bioacoustics. CENAREST, Okala and University of Stirling already hold significant databases and we will work to collate available data from other partners in the region to support the studentship. The successful candidate will utilise and analyse some of this data.

The successful candidate will first use existing data, together with information on land use, human populations and infrastructure, geography, topography and climate to understand the way in which wildlife community structure and species respond to different habitat modifiers, both human and climatic, using statistical analyses. Predictions generated from the statistical models will be used to generate expectations for how species and communities may vary in un-surveyed regions. New ground data collected in the second year, and additional data contributed by CBSI partners and the Biodiversity Observatory team will then be used to test the accuracy of the statistical model predictions.

Targeting areas of high uncertainty for additional data collection will we used to improve the statistical models. , to allow the project to produce robustly modelled estimations of how wildlife species diversity, richness and evenness vary across the Basin and how they are impacted by human pressure and climate.

Finally, the student will use the newly created knowledge, in collaboration with colleagues in the Biodiversity Observatory, the Vegetation Observatory and the AfriTRON network, to compare patterns of diversity and abundance across our surveyed taxa: trees, lianas, mammals, birds and fish, to elucidate drivers of responses common across all taxa and functional groups, and those that have uneven effects, disproportionately impacting certain taxa or groups. In this way, the most impactful human activities, and the zones most likely to be impacted by climate change will be identified, helping policy-makers to direct mitigation resources to the most critically endangered areas, and avoid the most harmful human activities taking place in the most vulnerable areas.

The student will work within the African Forest Ecology Group at the University of Stirling and collaborate closely with Okala, whose offices are also in Stirling. Within the CBSI, the studentship sits within the Biodiversity Observatory which is a team of 4 Senior Research staff, 2 Postdocs, 3 PhD students, 2 MSc students and 2 field technicians. To carry out this project, the student will be expected to spend around 3 years in the UK, around 1 year collecting data in the Congo Basin region.