Jenni is an experienced population and spatial modeller who joined the Framing Futures team after completing a NERC-funded postdoc entitled ‘Explaining and Predicting the Migration and Phenology of European-African Migratory Birds’ undertaken in collaboration with Durham University. 

Jenni’s research focuses on African-Eurasian migratory birds and has involved collating an extensive set of tracking, ringing and observation data on trans-Saharan migrant songbirds from Europe and Africa, and using large-scale spatiotemporal modelling techniques to look at changes in phenology, distributions and weights of a large number of species over space and time.  

In her previous four years as a Spatial Ecologist at BTO, Jenni worked on a wide range of projects, primarily centred around large datasets and modelling distributions and trends. These included:

• predictive modelling of bats’ spatial sensitivity to urbanisation and opportunities for birds and bats from habitat restoration;
• assessing gaps in survey coverage at a UK level for birds, bats, butterflies and plants;
• investigating the likelihood of non-native species invading the UK;
• modelling breeding phenology in farmland birds;
• modelling spatiotemporal change in UK bird trends;
• determining cuckoo use of protected areas and determining drivers of change in moorland breeding bird populations.

Before joining BTO, Jenni was involved in research such as determining population limitations in a lowland grassland migrant (the Whinchat), tagging and tracking seabirds and eradicating the invasive myna birds in the Seychelles.

2012-2015 - PhD, Lancaster University, “Determinants of survival, productivity and recruitment in a declining migrant bird, the whinchat, Saxicola rubetra”.
2005-2009 - BSc Honours Ecology and Conservation, University of St Andrews.