The Oxford Navigation Group
Graduate Opportunities
1) Space use in pelagic seabirds
Pelagic seabirds are amongst the greatest long-distance navigators on earth, they harvest sparsely distributed oceanic resources on huge scale, bringing them into potential conflict with human fisheries and other forms of ocean industrialisation. They are also one of the fastest declining groups of birds on earth. At OxNav, in the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford (and with close ties to researchers at the University of Liverpool), we focus on the Manx shearwater (and related species) as our model system for studying a broad range of challenging questions from elucidating the cognitive mechanisms underpinning oceanic navigation, optimal foraging tactics and diet, life-history decisions during breeding and their carry-over effects around the annual cycle, migratory behaviour, social behaviour, and the potential threats posed by fisheries by-catch, climate change, and off-shore wind development. We specialise in the deployment, development, and analytics of miniature bird-borne biotelemetry systems to study natural behaviour in the wild, and we work in a range of often remote seabird colonies from the Faroes to the Mediterranean islands (and sometimes places even further away such as New Zealand, Antarctica, The Falklands and Greenland). We are always looking for tallented students to join the Oxnav team, part of the broader Behaviour and Biomechanics section of the department, and are happy to discuss a range of potential DPhil/PhD project opportunities with interested applicants who have shown a level of promise in their first degree and/or Masters in Biology or a related relevant subject. Students with fieldwork interests and good analytical skills would be especially suited to our pelagic seabird research.
Whilst there are a small number of scholarship funding opportunities available directly through the Department of Biology, competitive applicants will be encouraged to apply for other funding opportunities and scholarships available through the University of Oxford, such as the doctoral training schemes, on which Tim Guilford is a participating supervisor.
Graduate applications & scholarships
Department of Biology (Deadline 4th March 2025 for places, but 8th January 2025 to be considered for scholarships)
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/dphil-biology
Integrative Life and Environmental Science Landscape Award (Deadline 29th January 2025)
Intelligent Earth Centre for Doctoral Training (Deadline 8th January 2025)
https://intelligent-earth.ox.ac.uk/home
2) Spatio-temporal determinants of by-catch in Europe's most endangered seabird
Ollie Padget (Liverpool), Jon Green (Liverpool) & Tim Guilford (Oxford)
This project, hosted between the newly-formed Avian Ecology Group at the University of Liverpool (where the student will be registered) and the University of Oxford, is the perfect opportunity to bring together long-term and short-term datasets to understand the complex interactions between climate change, bycatch and fisheries discards policy to provide essential information for stakeholders and policy makers aiming to curb the decline of Europe’s most endangered seabird.
Project specifics
The project will use long-term tracking datasets, long-term ringing and survival datasets and newly developed GPS-sound recorders to build a picture of where Balearic shearwaters are most exposed and vulnerable to bycatch. By understanding the spatio-termporal determinants of bycatch, lobbyists will be able to campaign accurately for mitigation methods in appropriate fisheries and have the evidence needed to change political opinion. The project will use extant (10+ years) geolocator and GPS tracking data combined with new sound-recorder-GPS data. Stage one will map boat associations detected by GPS-sound devices for breeding birds in Mallorca. Stage two will use these detections to train machine learning algorithms (neural networks, random forests, deep learning) to identify boat interactions in geolocator immersion loggers which can be deployed year-round and thus bycatch exposure measured over entire annual cycle. Stage three involves revisiting historic survival (from ringing) and geolocator data to understand how bycatch exposure predicts individual survival and demographic trends. Finally, we will model how the (2019) EU discards ban might affect population decline, particularly whether the ban reduces birds’ opportunity to form positive associations between boats and food, affecting bycatch risk.
Candidate profile
We are looking for somebody with a keen interest in both conservation and less-applied animal behaviour. While some experience analysing tracking data would be advantageous, we are interested primarily in people’s passion for the interaction between animal behaviour and conservation. We have no specific requirements for background beyond the ACCE+ PhD pre-requisites but a degree in biological sciences would be beneficial, as would an interest in more quantitative aspects of biology. The candidate will have the opportunity for substantial periods of fieldwork in the Balearic Islands (some of which will be remote and in caves), but field work is not essential.
Graduate student opportunities
We are always keen to consider applications for graduate study within the group. Most of our graduates are funded through Doctoral Training Centres or Doctoral Training Partnerships at the University of Oxford (such as BBSRC and NERC), or directly via other scholarships advertised through the University or the Department (of Biology). For details and deadlines, please go directly to their websites. Below are two specific projects on offer as CASE partnerships.
Environmental Research at Oxford NERC DTP, CASE studentships available: apply directly to the Oxford NERC DTP.
Compass rafting in a colonial seabird: the unknown role of social information
Seabird colonies may function as information centres in which information about widely, patchily, and unpredictably distributed foraging resources is exchanged socially. However, the scale and function of social information in natural, wild biological systems has been hard to test. Huge advances in miniature biologging technologies have in recent years greatly improved our understanding of individual long distance movement behaviour, and its ecological drivers, helping to inform marine conservation and fisheries policies around the world. But individual loggers tell only half the story because they have largely failed to sample the role of social information and decision-making in animals. In the current project we propose to study this knowledge gap by focussing on the hypothesised phenomenon of “compass rafting” in a colonial seabird, the Manx shearwater. Shearwaters, like many colonial seabirds, form large collections of individuals at sea before and after making landfall, and spectacular though these collections are their function is not well understood. In one study of rafting in shags (Weimerskirch et al., 2010), individual tracking combined with coastal surveying demonstrated a possible orientation signalling function, with individuals using the “compass rafts” to identify the best foraging routes out from the colony. We propose to combine individual biotelemetric tracking, visual marking, and innovative drone surveilance to study the use of rafts by outgoing and returning foragers to our Manx shearwater study colony on Skomer island, where we already have very good background understanding of behaviour and a robust study system and infrastucture. The proposed project would be available to a successful NERC DTP applicant and would incorporate CASE funding and technical support from Animal Dynamics, and would be supervised by Professor Tim Guilford within the OxNav research group in Oxford’s Department of Zoology.
Richards C, Padget O, Guilford T, & Bates AE. (2019) “Manx shearwater (Puffinus puffinus) rafting behaviour revealed by GPS tracking and behavioural observations.” PeerJ 7:e7863.
Weimerskirch H, Bertrand S, Silva J, Marques JC, Goya E. 2010. Use of social information
in seabirds: compass rafts indicate the heading of food patches. PLOS ONE
5:e9928 DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0009928.
Seabird diets in a changing environment
The CASE partner for this project is MacArthur Green & Dogger Bank Offshore Wind
Many UK seabird populations are declining and our marine ecosystems are failing to meet internationally recognised criteria for “Good Environmental Status (GES)”. UK Government aims to restore UK marine environment to GES and is developing a Seabird Conservation Strategy. Development of marine renewables (particularly offshore wind farms) represents a new and rapidly increasing pressure on seabirds. UK Government is considering the closure of sandeel fisheries either as a measure to recover marine ecosystems to GES or as compensation for impacts of offshore wind on key seabird species. The efficacy of such measures depends on the strength of links between seabird diet and demography. However, understanding of seabird diet is limited to a small number of colonies, to seabird species that are easily studied, and especially to the chick-rearing period. DNA metabarcoding allows the possibility for study of seabird diets throughout the breeding season, potentially outside the breeding season with birds caught at sea, and for a wider range of species and colonies, but has not yet been widely applied to study of UK seabirds.
The key aim is to determine whether DNA metabarcoding can provide information on the diets of UK breeding seabirds that could help to explain temporal and spatial patterns in seabird demography and so identify key drivers of seabird population change. The student will engage in fieldwork at several serabird colonies around the uk, and on several seabird species, with which the supervisors have established research links. The project will be supported by CASE partners MacArthur Green, and environmental consultancy, and Dogger Bank Offshore Wind, developers of the world's largest offshore wind farm and sponsors of several alied research projects invsetgiating seabird biology and conservation. This DPhil studentship will help to inform government conservation policy and will help developers of offshore renewables to gain a better understanding of the ecological needs of seabirds that may be impacted by their industry.
If you are interested in this project, please contact Tim Guilford in the first instance tim.guilford@biology.ox.ac.uk
Further reading:
Burnell, D., Perkins, A.J., Newton, S.F., Bolton, M., Tierney, T.D. and Dunn, T.E. 2023. Seabirds Count. A census of breeding seabirds in Britain and Ireland (2015-2021). Lynx, Barcelona.
Fayet, A.L., Clucas, G.V., Anker-Nilssen, T., Syposz, M. and Hansen, E.S. 2021. Local prey shortages drive foraging costs and breeding success in a declining seabird, the Atlantic puffin. Journal of Animal Ecology 90: 1152-1164.
Querejeta, M., Lefort, M-C., Bretagnolle, V. and Boyer, S. 2023. Metabarcoding fecal samples to investigate spatiotemporal variation in the diet of the endangered Westland petrel (Procellaria westlandica). Avian Conservation and Ecology 18: 17.