Danielle L Thompson

University of Aberdeen | ABDN · School of Biological sciences

There is little evidence documenting the prevalence of plastic nest incorporation for different seabird species and populations, and even less detailing the source of such debris as nesting material. This study presents a baseline dataset on the presence of plastic in the nests of five seabird species on Lady Isle, Scotland using a novel and repeat...

Conservation guidance—an authoritative source of information and recommendations explicitly supporting decision-making and action regarding nature conservation—represents an important tool to communicate evidence-based advice to conservation actors. Given the rapidly increasing pressure that climate change poses to biodiversity, producing accessibl...

Over the past decade, drones have become increasingly popular in environmental biology and have been used to study wildlife on all continents. Drones have become of global importance for surveying breeding seabirds by providing opportunities to transform monitoring techniques and allow new research on some of the most threatened birds. However, suc...

The first poster from my PhD sharing initial analyses on individual and colony-level variation in foraging trip metrics using novel GPS data. Awarded the poster prize at NESEN 2023 and highly commended at QUADRAT ASM 2023.

The Red-throated Diver Energetics Project aimed to obtain empirical data on red-throated diver foraging behaviour during the non-breeding season. This report summarises the overall results from the project. This report summarises the overall results from the Red-throated Diver Energetics Project, presenting novel data on wintering location and for...

Understanding how we can increase the resilience of forest systems to future extreme drought events is increasingly important as these events become more frequent and intense. Diversifying production forests using intimate mixtures of trees with complementary functional traits is considered as one promising silvicultural approach that may increase...

In July 2018, DEFRA contracted JNCC to develop a UK marine bird bycatch Plan of Action (PoA) to: “Deliver a coherent approach to understand and where necessary reduce marine bird bycatch in UK fisheries, through engagement and dialogue with all interested parties and the implementation of subsequent recommendations”. Stemming from that request and...

Offshore wind development around Europe is increasing to meet the demands for renewable energy production to help meet climate change targets. It is known that marine birds such as red-throated divers (Gavia stellata) are highly sensitive to disturbance caused by the construction and operation of offshore wind farms and are subsequently displaced f...

This advice note provides information on kittiwake identification, followed by a methodology to determine whether kittiwakes are breeding on an installation. It provides details of how to obtain an accurate estimate of the number of breeding birds and the likely fledging date of any chicks, to help inform decision-making regarding the scheduling of...

This report details the third field season of the Red-throated Diver Energetics Project (https://jncc.gov.uk/our-work/rtde-project/). During 2018-2020, archival geolocator (GLS) and time depth recorder (TDR) tags were deployed and retrieved from red-throated divers breeding in Scotland, Finland and Iceland to quantify foraging behaviour and approxi...

The European Breeding Bird Atlas is one of the most ambitious biodiversity mapping projects ever done. This book presents information on all species reported to breed in the study period 2013–2017. A total of 556 species are treated with a full species account, while a further 69 rare species are included in an appendix. Species accounts include 50...

Offshore windfarms are seen as a key part of efforts to combat climate change. However, there are a number of significant concerns about the potential of these windfarms to have a negative impact on wildlife and biodiversity, particularly in relation to birds. This is of particular concern as the scale of offshore windfarm development expands so th...

Presenting some of my MSc (Res) findings on the impacts of climate change on UK amphibian breeding phenology.