Brennen Fagan

Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

Brennen Fagan and collaborators are looking for candidates for three PhD projects through findaphd.com.

1) Re-imagining the Waters: rewilding opportunities and sustainable harvest in Haweswater and Ullswater
At the heart of the Lake District is a tangled web of history, stakeholder perspectives, ecosystem services, and the ecosystems themselves. In this project, the student will work to start disentangling this web in the context of the lakes in the Lake District, focusing on fishing in the lakes. In the process, the student will look into why the fishing industry and biodiversity collapsed, how the aquatic ecosystems work today, local perspectives, and what the lakes might look like in the future.

2) Habitat restoration and prioritisation in dynamic landscapes
Conservation efforts are ongoing in the Lake District, but good conservation needs good modelling to know what might work where and when. In this project, the student will partner with Cumbria Connect to understand and prioritise habitat for multiple species simultaneously starting with the Condatis decision support software. This will require interpreting Condatis outputs in the context of the on-the-ground reality of conservation and restoration and models of species interactions and needs.

3) Past-present-future variations in carbon stocks, and trade-offs with other ecosystem services in the Kruger National Park, South Africa
Oftentimes our vision of “good” habitat is rooted in idealised visions of European forests; this baseline can mean we neglect or underestimate services offered by other ecosystems such as savannas and grasslands. In this project, the student will collaborate with Scientific Services with Kruger National Park in South Africa to examine what tree cover has existed in the park through time and how this tree cover relates to carbon storage. The student will then use this knowledge to explore the consequences of different futures local stakeholders are considering.