The marine rewilding effect: Building a cost-effective framework for measuring Marine Net Gain

Supervisors:

• Dr Laurence De Clippele (University of Glasgow)
• Dr Flurina Wartmann (University of Aberdeen)
• Dr Tom Hodgson (CreditNature)
• Dr Tiffany Vlaar (University of Glasgow)

Project Summary:

Marine ecosystems are essential for planetary health and are critical for carbon storage and supporting biodiversity. However, they face increasing threats from human activities and environmental degradation, necessitating urgent restoration efforts. Rewilding, a restoration approach focused on creating self-sustaining ecosystems, offers a pathway to biodiversity net gain and delivering societal benefits. The funding for such initiatives is likely to be increasingly coming from emergent nature markets that finance biodiversity through activities such as seagrass and oyster bed restoration. Such financing requires reliable metrics to measure rewilding progress and success, which are currently lacking for marine efforts.

This PhD project will provide a robust, scalable framework for monitoring marine rewilding in relation to emergent nature markets and biodiversity offsetting. CreditNature is this project’s industry partner, who developed the world’s first externally accredited framework for terrestrial ecosystems, however they lack the expert knowledge of marine ecosystems. This project supports the creation of measurable, market-ready ecological assets, which will be directly relevant to CreditNature and other nature finance organisations requiring robust data on investment in nature credits. It will enable CreditNature to replicate their successes to marine environments, enabling nature positive outcomes at an even greater scale. The project will use data from Loch Craignish (with SeaWilding), open-source datasets, and newly collected field data.

Objectives:

• Literature Review: Evaluate how current marine rewilding projects evaluate their ecological and social impacts; their compatibility with nature markets/compliance mechanisms and CreditNature’s framework[1].
• Acoustic Indicators: Develop acoustic-based metrics by using acoustic biodiversity indices, fine-tuning existing fish sound detectors, and estimating photosynthesis rates from bubble-popping sounds[2]. Rewilding at Loch Craignish started in May 2023 (rhizome planting), with acoustic data available from before and during the restoration (January-October 2023).
• Geospatial Indicators: Development of landscape-based metrics, using machine-learning modelling approaches to model current and future changes to the landscape because of the rewilding in relation to carbon storage in sediments and oyster shells[3].
• Societal Indicators: Design metrics to evaluate societal benefits such as changes in fishing and tourism, and immaterial benefits such as effects on well-being and sense of place. Existing societal and cultural indicators will be tested and further developed[4] to empirically measure socio-economic benefits.
• Integrate: Integrate the metric framework into the CreditNature Platform, which reports metrics while highlighting uncertainty to predict the extent to which rewilding mitigates negative human impacts and enhances ecological integrity.

To apply visit: https://netgain.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/phd-projects/

Student Profile:

This interdisciplinary 4-year PhD project would suit someone with a background in ecology, marine science, earth science, maths, computer science, engineering, physics, or a geophysics degree.

Essential:

• Skills relevant to at least one of the proposed PhD objectives, i.e. bioacoustics, maths/machine-learning and/or socio-economics.
• Ability to manipulate data sets using R and/or Python and/or GIS.  

Desirable:

• Experience in developing machine learning models of audio or image data processing.
• Experience in processing passive acoustic data, satellite images, survey data.
• Fieldwork experience.

Benefits of being part of the NETGAIN PhD Programme:

• You will become part of the new generation of leaders in the emergent nature markets, and be part of the NETGAIN Community (https://netgain.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/).
• Training by environmental and socio-economical science experts.
• Interdisciplinary supervisory team which has strong expertise in marine science, machine learning, maths and socio-economics.
• Build an extensive network in academia, industry and the governmental institutions.
• Work placement with CreditNature (https://creditnature.com/).
• Opportunity to engage with University of Glasgow courses and the Ecological Data Science Doctoral Training programme PhD students (https://ecological-data-science.github.io/about.html).

Read the guidelines on the NETGAIN website carefully and fill in the Application Form provided here: https://netgain.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/phd-projects/. Interview will be held week of 17 February. Contact [email protected] for further information.