Bird’s-eye views: tracking landscape change through remote sensing imagery and movements of Black-tailed Godwits
How Black-tailed Godwits interact with rapidly changing landscapes
The thesis of Taylor Craft explores how Black-tailed Godwits interact with landscapes that are undergoing rapid environmental and land-use change along the East Atlantic Flyway. The overarching aim is to understand how movement, habitat use, and landscape dynamics are linked across different phases of the annual cycle, and how these links can be used to support conservation in agricultural and wetland systems.
The research brings together approaches from movement ecology, remote sensing, and field-based landscape analysis to address three broad goals. First, it seeks to characterize key godwit landscapes across breeding and nonbreeding regions, with particular attention to how land management, hydrology, and seasonal change structure the environments that godwits depend on. Second, it focuses on understanding how godwits move within and between these landscapes, especially during sensitive periods such as chick rearing and the nonbreeding season, in order to connect individual movement decisions to broader landscape context. Third, the thesis aims to improve the accessibility and usability of ecological data by developing open-source tools and workflows that connect tracking data with remotely sensed environmental information.
Throughout, the thesis adopts a landscape-based perspective that treats godwits as mobile indicators of environmental change. By combining ecological questions with reflection on data sources and analytical infrastructure, the work emphasizes not only what can be learned about migratory birds, but also how knowledge about changing landscapes is produced and applied in conservation research and practice.