This student subject is part of the « Light on Landscape » project, which is the immediate continuation of the « Light on Nature » project .
Bats are strictly night active species, and suffer from light pollution. The main objective of this project is to study the light intensity dependent habitat loss and fragmentation. The 2021 field season will mostly focus on the barrier effect of infrastructure (bridges, culverts, underpasses) illumination on bats flying over water surface. To do that, a mobile lighting setup with light variation will be applied for light impact assessment. Bat behavior will be studied with acoustic tracking by using microphone arrays. We can estimate the 3D positions of bats and thus their trajectory by recording their echolocation signals. The differences in arrival time of the sound between several microphones are calculated by cross-correlation and then converted into 3D-positions.
What are we looking for?
We need two highly motivated and independent students to assist in our fieldwork (from May to August 2021) and to analyze the data afterwards. This topic is more suitable for long-term internships or Master’s thesis (6 months). Students are encouraged to come up with their own research question, but here are some possible lines of research:
• Are bats taking alternative routes if commuting corridors are experimentally lit?
• Do bats alter their flight behavior when approaching lit underpasses (i.e. flight speed, height, tortuosity,…)?
• Does the experimental lighting alter the insect density? Does it affect the foraging effort of bats along the flying routes? This study can be undertaken by placing sticky sheets trap and/or camera traps for insects and by analyzing acoustic data for feeding buzzes.
Requirements
• Driving license is essential, you might need to drive 1-2 hours per day to move between sites.
• Fieldwork requires flexibility to work outside the normal working hours (mostly at night).
• Proficiency in R or similar programming language would be desirable.
• Enthusiasm!
Duration
6 months – from April/May to September/October 2021 – of course we are mostly dependent on the summer season, but we can talk about different start- and end dates
Contact
