Welcome to the Ecology Department pages. The Ecology Department covers a broad range of topic areas including
Within (and across) each of these themes, a wide range of project activities are undertaken varying in scale from large EU projects like ECASA, SPICOSA and HERMES, through NERC Core Programme and responsive grants, Government Department commissions and commercial contracts, to a range of individual PhD studentships. Currently the group comprises 13 Principal Investigators, 6 Post-doctoral workers and 9 Support Scientists. There are presently 9 PhD students working in the department with several students at UK Universities who are co-supervised by Ecology Department Staff.
The key drivers of our research are the responses of individuals and communities to environmental changes caused by human activities and changing climate. Our work is cast both in theoretical and applied contexts, attempting to understand ecosystem processes and their sensitivities.
Much of our work is focussed on the “Northern Seas” from the west of Scotland sea lochs and NE Atlantic, to the Svalbard fjords and continental margin, areas thought to be particularly sensitive to changing climate and/or alterations of global circulation processes. However, we are also at work at several other locations around the globe, for example the Antarctic, the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea, giving us the ability to see the bigger picture of a dynamic global ecosystem responding to dynamic environmental and anthropogenic forcing.
