Mr Alexander Adams

I am a PhD student focussing on freshwater ecosystems and surrounding terrestrial habitats. I am particularly interested in the role of large herbivores in rewilding, and in using ecoacoustics as a tool for biodiversity assessment. My current project explores the ecosystem impacts of habitat engineering by reintroduced beavers, using audio recordings to characterise freshwater habitats and their associated ecological communities, focussing on birds, bats, and aquatic invertebrates.
My supervisors are Nigel Willby, Alan Law, Elisa Fuentes-Montemayor, and Aileen Mill (Newcastle University).
My PhD is funded by NERC through the Iapetus doctoral training partnership.

Biography

• PhD Ecology (University of Stirling): 2023 -
• MSci Zoology (University of Sussex): 2017 - 2022

Current Research

Does rewilding improve ecosystem resilience? A soundscape perspective

Ecosystem engineers increase habitat heterogeneity, promoting biodiversity at a landscape scale. As ecosystem engineers, beavers alter their environment through the creation of complex wetland habitats, featuring ponds formed by their characteristic dam-building behaviour. The impacts of beaver activities on aquatic biodiversity are well known, but few studies have explored the potential spillover effects extending beyond these ponds into the surrounding terrestrial environment. Therefore, we have a limited understanding of the added value of beaver ponds in a landscape, particularly heavily modified landscapes. In this PhD, we address that research gap using passive acoustic monitoring at beaver ponds and other, human-created and naturally occurring, non-beaver ponds.
The project has three key research aims:

1. Explore lateral spillover effects from wetlands into the surrounding terrestrial habitat using bioacoustics data collection, focussing on birds and bats, and contrasting beaver-engineered systems with un-engineered streams and ponds.
2. Determine if there are differences in temporal stability or recovery rate of ecoacoustic indicators in beaver engineered and control systems in relation to the timing of environmental shocks and the landscape context in which these occur.
3. Test the complementary value of the aquatic soundscape for characterising small wetlands and their relative habitat complexity and the consistency between ecoacoustics evidence and that yielded by traditional sampling approaches.

Research has been conducted at Bamff Wildland in Perthshire, Scotland, and in the Evo area in Hämeenlinna, Finland.

Research Interests

• Rewilding
• Species reintroductions
• Beavers as “ecosystem engineers”
• Bioacoustics
• Ecoacoustics & freshwater soundscape analysis