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Birds breeding on wet grassland are suffering major population declines all over Europe. The populations of black-tailed godwit, Limosa limosa ssp limosa suffer from intensification of farming as well as from agricultural land abandonment across the breeding range. While we have a relatively good understanding of the mechanisms that underlie population dynamics of black-tailed godwits in the core breeding area in north-western Europe, we know little about other areas in Europe. In this project we aim to collect the ecological knowledge that is required to design a European, cross-continental strategy for the sustainable conservation of black-tailed godwits. The specific questions that will be examined in this project are (i) What relation exists between land use intensity and the density of black-tailed godwit breeding pairs? (ii) What relation exists between land use intensity and black-tailed godwit chick survival? (iii) What cues do black-tailed godwits use to start laying eggs? The work involves intensive collaboration with research groups that work on this species in different European countries. The thesis will be equally based on new data collected in the field and on the analysis of the existing data collected by the cooperation partners. The PhD project will be supervised jointly by the Estonian University of Life Sciences, Tartu, Estonia (Olavi Kurina, Hannes Pehlak) and Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands (David Kleijn).
More details: http://pk.emu.ee/en/research/phdpositions/