Biodiversity and Conservation (Taught)

Develop your knowledge about major conservation issues and their human and environmental drivers across a range of ecosystems. Gain the skills you’ll need to understand how we can balance human needs with efforts to address the biodiversity and climate crisis.

Course description

This MSc course prepares you for a career protecting biodiversity in a range of natural, agricultural and urban ecosystems around the world. Throughout your course, you'll be in the field learning about conservation issues in major ecosystems, from tropical forests to cities, and coral reefs to the deep sea, and the constraints posed by budgets, policy and legislation. We’ll also show you how environmental change can impact biodiversity and how the effective management of ecosystems can positively impact both biodiversity and the ecosystem itself

Fieldwork is a big part of the course. You'll gain hands-on experience in designing and conducting projects in the field, helping you to understand the challenges faced in real-world conservation projects. You'll also receive training in the principles of experimental design and data collection, equipping you with the key skills to plan, manage, and generate data from your own research.

To embed your learning, you’ll take part in a residential field course on the North Norfolk coast, one of Europe’s premier wildlife sites and a region with significant conservation challenges and varied management efforts.

You’ll also conduct an independent research project, spending three months researching an area of biodiversity or conservation that matches your interests and equips you for your future career. You could be field-based, lab-based or complete a computational data-driven project, tackling topics such as urbanisation, ecosystem services, tropical deforestation, and marine conservation.

Example previous research projects include:

• Is land sparing or land sharing farming best for conservation of biodiversity and carbon in upland UK?

• Bigger, better, more, joined: habitat fragmentation and the conservation of rare birds in the Peak District

• Traits in space and time: mobilising biodiversity data for conservation, macroecology, and macroevolution

• Investigating the abiotic and biotic factors influencing territory distribution of an avian riverine specialist

• Biodiversity change under climate and environmental variation

• Using eDNA data for biodiversity monitoring

Please see our University website for the most up-to-date course information.