CAnMove

I am mainly interested in conservation and behavioral ecology. In my PhD project that I started in the spring of 2008, I am investigating the house sparrow (Passer Domesticus) decline in the agricultural landscape and how this is connected to the loss of land use heterogeneity. During my PhD I will get to work with conservational issues and sustainable management using behavioral indicators, monitoring of demographic patterns and genetics.

Species connected to the farmland have declined during the last 30 years. The reason for this is the agricultural intensification that has led to lower food abundances and possibly a resource separation for many species. The house sparrow is one of the affected species and has declined more than 50 % since 1975. In this project we have established 25 house sparrow populations in the southern part of Sweden, Scania. The populations are situated in agricultural landscapes differing in development. By monitoring and performing experiments on these colonies we aim at finding out more about the population ecology and the limiting resouces for the house sparrow. We also aim at detecting possible differences in limiting resources between agricultural regions. We believe that a resource separation might have led the declining causes to differ depending on the landscape content.