CONSERVATION and BEHAVIOUR
Meet The Team
Sarah Papworth
Senior Lecturer in Conservation Biology
My research focuses on how the social and physical environment affects individual behaviour, and how this behaviour, can, in turn, alter that environment. I am particularly interested in primate behaviour, hunting in the tropics and how we make decisions about conservation. My approach to conservation science includes human decisions and behaviour as part of a complex ecosystem, thus most of my work is interdisciplinary and has a strong human focus. I combine approaches and theory from ecology, anthropology and psychology
Larissa Barker
Postdoctoral Fellow Royal Holloway
I started my postdoctoral fellowship using machine learning to process camera trap experiments in September 2023. Before this, I spent a year as the staff biologist at the Amazon Research Centre in Peru. My PhD research at Royal Holloway from 2018-2022 focused on understanding the impact of human visitors on pygmy marmoset behaviour. I used passive acoustic monitoring with Audiomoth to quantify seasonal and spatial differences in anthropogenic noise and pygmy marmoset vocalisations. I also monitored birds of prey at the site to understand variation in non-human predators at the site, and finally tested whether pygmy marmoset responses to human noise were analogous to their responses to predators.
Elisa Fernandez-Fueyo
PhD Student Royal Holloway
I started my PhD in September 2021. I’m investigating gestural and vocal communication in wild chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) at the Tsaobis Baboon Project, co-supervised by Alecia Carter (UCL). I am recording behaviour using video cameras, and investigating the efficacy of machine learning programmes to recognise and classify behaviours. I am funded by the BBSRC LIDO doctoral training program.
Beth Lord
MSc student 2021 Royal Holloway
I started my MSc in September 2021. I am interested in hazel dormice and am working to census them at sites in Surrey.
Rina Quinlan
PhD Student Royal Holloway
I started my PhD in September 2022. I am interested in rewilding with megaherbivores as keystone species, focusing on elk and bison. My PhD will combine data from palaeobiology, ecology and policy and will hopefully underpin plans for reintroductions to Britain and beyond. I also co-chair the Large Herbivore Working Group, and sit on the Sussex Mammal Group Commitee, Sussex Beaver Partnership and the South East England Pine Martin Working Group. I am co-supervised by Professor Danielle Shreve (RHUL) and Professor Jens-Christian Svenning (Aarhus University).