Amy is excited to be joining the Biodiversity and Sustainability Research Group after having completed the first three years of her integrated Master’s in Biology at Jesus College Oxford, where she was awarded a scholarship for academic excellence. Amy’s interest in the use of technology for ecological monitoring was sparked while analysing the scent marking behaviour of pine marten’s using camera trap footage collected in the New Forest, England. She then furthered her interests by participating in gathering field data for Defra’s ‘Oak and Ash Tree Survey’, a project which aimed to assess the accuracy of satellite identification of tree species.

Amy looks forward to using the skills she has developed to complete her Master’s project which will focus on the important issues of human-wildlife conflict and livestock depredation. She will be using camera trap footage collected in Central Kenya to analyse the effect of environmental variables on the rate of carnivore encounters with livestock. She hopes this research will aid in the development of targeted and effective depredation mitigation strategies to reduce human-carnivore conflict.