Trinity student wins international award for undergraduate research in bird ecology
Posted on: 24 September 2018
Lyndsay Walsh, currently a postgraduate student in Trinity’s Master in Development Practice programme, has won a prestigious international award for undergraduate research that took her to the tropical forests of Mexico. She is the winner of the 2018 Undergraduate Award in the Earth & Environmental Sciences category.
The Undergraduate Awards recognise top undergraduate work, share this work with a global audience and connect students across cultures and disciplines. The core values associated with the awards are innovation, collaboration, ambition, impartiality, inclusiveness and efficiency. You can find out more about the awards here.
While in Mexico, Lyndsay was investigating how habitat influences bird abundance, diversity and feeding guilds within the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. The tropical forests of this region are a hotspot for biodiversity and host over 300 resident bird species, yet few ornithological studies have been carried out before.
Lyndsay discovered that although habitat varied considerably within the reserve (with more humid conditions in the south changing to drier conditions in the north) bird abundance and diversity did not, with species sensitive to habitat degradation, such as insect-feeders, doing particularly well throughout the reserve.
The region has experienced stochastic (random, hard to predict) weather events for millennia, which has led to mosaic-like sections of forest that differ from other neighbouring sections. As a result, many of the bird species living there may have become adapted to living in disturbed habitats. They are likely to be sensitive to habitat degradation, and with the human population rising and the general trend in the tropics seeing increased deforestation to support agriculture, these findings could have important conservation implications.
Professor of Zoology at Trinity, Yvonne Buckley, said: “We are very proud of Lyndsay’s achievement. It’s great to see her intelligence, self-motivation and hard work rewarded and it’s wonderful to see research done by undergraduate students honoured in this way. Research-led teaching has so many benefits for students as it helps them to develop critical analysis and independent thought, which is useful in many future careers.”
“I also always love to see students getting out into the field to find out something new. In Lyndsay’s case this took her all the way to Mexico, but even closer to home in Ireland there’s still so much we need to find out about our biodiversity and how animals and plants respond to changes we are making to the environment. Undergraduate research projects are a great way of connecting our students to the real world.”