Wallace Coffee Talks - 18 June 2019

Wallace Coffee Talks - Spring 2019 

18 June - 1pm - Zoology Museum

Ashleigh Harper (Swansea University, UK)

Wildfires: Relearning to live with them, a British perspective

Wildfire is an integral part of the Earth system and has been for over 350 million years. It is a natural process and vital to many of the world’s ecosystems for rejuvenating vegetation, initiating seed dispersal and germination, clearing ground debris and maintaining biodiversity. As a result of climate change and human activities wildfires have been introduced to historically non-fire-adapted ecosystems causing the ‘wildfire problem’ we are currently experiencing. What does this mean for Britain and how can we relearn to live with fire?

Baptiste Garde (Swansea University, UK)

How do landscape and weather affect flight costs?

Flight is one of the most energetically costly of bird activities, and the extent to which birds modulate their decisions to minimise their energy expenditure in flight remains an active area of research. The goal of my PhD is to understand how flight costs are affected by the environment, especially the interaction between weather and landscape, and how birds respond to these effects. Behavioural responses may range from birds selecting flight paths that do not vary with flow conditions (instead reflecting a response to other factors), to birds modulating their flight trajectories, speed and flight mode (flapping versus soaring) in order to reduce costs. 

During my first year, I worked on finding a method to quantify energy expenditure in free flight with the help of accelerometery. I am now trying to understand the parameters that influence speed selection and the extent to which this behaviour relates to energy saving. This has been tested widely for flying animals, because the “power curve” leads to specific predictions about the flight speeds that animals should adopt in different scenarios. Nonetheless, this model is designed for level flight and does not explain the high variability in flight speeds often observed in powered flight. I equipped homing pigeons (Columba livia) with 1 Hz GPSs to examine the extent to which flapping birds vary their flight speed in relation to their climb rate and the influence of environmental factors on their flight altitude.