Gareth Jones was awarded a grant of £96,000 from the SITA trust for a PhD studentship on ‘Bats, churches and the landscape: sustainable conservation of bats in the East of England’. The studentship is in collaboration with the Bat Conservation Trust and was awarded to Madeleine Ryan, who recently completed the MSc in Ecology and Management of the Natural Environment at Bristol. Madeleine started the project on May 3rd.
Gareth Jones, Stephen Harris and Emma Stone also received a grant for £375,000 from Defra on ‘Improving mitigation success where bats occupy houses and historic buildings’.
Together the projects will allow a better understanding of why bats select particular churches as roost sites and will explore methods for encouraging bats to roost elsewhere if problems associated with the bats’ presence arise. Experiments will also investigate how bats respond to exclusion from roosts.