Rebecca Senior
PhD
Research
I completed my PhD in October 2018. Please see my personal website for news of what I’m up to next.
My PhD explored the interactions between land-use change and climate change at different spatial scales in the tropics.
Tropical rainforests are vital for the conservation of global biodiversity. They are home to the vast majority of the Earth’s terrestrial species, and are increasingly threatened both by land-use change and by extreme warming relative to historical climatic stability in this region.
To avoid extinction under climate change organisms must either adapt in situ or move. Through my PhD, I aimed to better understand how land-use change impacts the efficacy and feasibility of these two strategies for coping with climate change. This included fieldwork to understand how selective logging in Borneo has impacted the availability of microclimates, and modelling to identify how and where tropical land-use change has impacted the ability of forest species to track their preferred climate.
PhD publications
Senior, R A, Hill, J K, González del Pliego, P, Goode, L K, Edwards, D P (2017) A pantropical analysis of the impacts of forest degradation and conversion on local temperature. Ecol. Evol., 7, 7897–7908. DOI
Senior, R A, Hill, J K, Benedick, S, Edwards, D P (2017) Tropical forests are thermally buffered despite intensive selective logging. Glob. Change Biol., 1–12. DOI
About me
Outside of the department I spend most of my time outside! I love running, hiking and dogs. When I’m inside, I like baking and reading.
