Biodiversity and Conservation Master of Science - MSc (UG)

Understand the major conservation issues and their human and environmental drivers across a range of ecosystems. You’ll gain the skills to make a difference, balancing human needs with efforts to address the biodiversity and climate crises.

Course description

This course will prepare you for a career protecting biodiversity in a range of natural, managed, and urban ecosystems around the world.

You'll learn all 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 integral to 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, including how to use the statistical programming language R, 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 richest biodiversity regions with significant conservation challenges and varied management efforts. During the week, you’ll investigate diverse ecological questions which may include the effects of agricultural practices on biodiversity, or the impact of disturbance in sensitive ecosystems on the diversity of plants.

The biggest part of your course is your independent research project. Here, you’ll spend three months researching an area of biodiversity or conservation that matches your interests, ready 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.

Examples of previous student research projects include:

* 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

* Is the threat of increasing forest wildfires best predicted by species ecological traits or their geographic distribution?

* Size matters: unveiling the role of genome size in grass adaptation to environmental change

* Effects of urbanisation on biodiversity and ecosystem services

* Tracking the effectiveness of habitat management for biodiversity in the Peak District

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