Project description
When urban birds fall out of sync
As cities warm and green spaces shrink, urban wildlife faces a timing crisis. Species like tits rely on precise seasonal cues, such as the hatching of caterpillars, to feed their young. But climate change and urbanisation are throwing these cues out of sync. In the wild, warmer springs can still signal birds to lay eggs earlier. In cities, though, those signals are muddled, risking a mismatch between chicks and their food supply. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the UrbanPACE project is investigating whether urban bird populations across Europe can still adjust their breeding to shifting spring temperatures. It aims to reveal how climate and urbanisation together reshape food webs, and whether city-dwelling wildlife can keep pace with change.
Objective
Human-driven environmental change is affecting wildlife globally, with climate change and urbanisation having major impacts. For instance, warmer spring temperatures and urbanisation have been shown to independently advance the timing of recurring events in wild populations like leafing in trees, hatching in caterpillars, and egg laying in birds. Getting the timing right is critical for predator species like tits that rely on feeding prey resources like caterpillars to their chicks each spring. Tits can adjust the timing of their egg laying to match the hatching of their prey by responding to environmental cues like spring temperatures. In urban environments these cues may be highly modified and less reliable, which could negatively affect urban wildlife populations like tits if they can not track the timing of their prey. The UrbanPACE (Urban Phenology and Anthropogenic Climate Effects) research program will aim to establish whether urban tit populations across Europe adjust their egg laying to spring temperatures in the same way as nonurban populations, and evaluate the ability of urban populations to keep pace with climate change and further advances in spring timing. UrbanPACE will then determine whether spring timings are in sync between species in urban food webs. Using citizen science initiatives across the UK, I will explore whether climate change can increase mismatches between urban species by disrupting the timing of key events like leafing in trees and egg laying in tits. My results will provide new insights on how multiple processes of anthropogenic change interact to affect wildlife and evaluate whether urban populations are more vulnerable to a warming climate.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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EH8 9YL Edinburgh
United Kingdom
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