Claire Feniuk
cf357@cam.ac.uk
Tel:
+44 (0)1223 336670
Before starting a PhD in 2011, I completed my undergraduate studies in Biology at the University of Bristol, followed by an MSc in Biodiversity and Conservation at the University of Leeds. During my Masters I studied the effects of sympathetic land management practices and habitat variables on bat activity on Welsh Farmland. I also spent a year working as an intern for two UK-based conservation NGOs: firstly for the Bat Conservation Trust, working on an agri-environment monitoring project; and then for the RSPB, working with their Conservation Science and Agriculture Policy teams.
Research Interests
I am interested in landscape-scale strategies to minimise the impact of food production on biodiversity in Europe: in particular, whether it is better for biodiversity to produce food at a high yield in a relatively small area thus “sparing” unfarmed land for nature, or to produce food at a lower yield but over a greater area, making space for nature within the farmed landscape itself. My field research is based in the Lubelskie region of eastern Poland, which supports some beautiful areas of natural habitat including old-growth forests, fen mires and floodplain meadows, as well as a diverse range of agricultural land use types, from low-yielding traditional mixed farmland mosaics up to relatively high-yielding arable land.
My PhD is funded by NERC, in partnership with BirdLife International, and is supervised by Prof. Andrew Balmford, Prof. Rhys Green, and Dr. Ian Burfield.
