Climate change is rapidly becoming the major threat to biodiversity globally, and birds are no exception. For the past ten years, the Hot Birds Research Project team, led by Dr Susie Cunningham at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town, and her collaborator Prof Andrew McKechnie at the University of Pretoria, have been working to find out how climate warming will affect the birds of hot deserts globally. Together with our talented students and post-docs (over half of whom are women) we have learnt an enormous amount about the thermal physiology of birds, how they cope with rising temperatures, and the limits of their tolerance. We’ve discovered avian ‘superheros’ and also species that are uniquely vulnerable, and we’ve begun to understand some of the facets of why. We’ve also learned that the behaviour of birds can be as important as their physiology in shaping how they cope (or don’t cope) with high temperatures, and that behavioural changes for keeping cool carry costs that could reverberate through ecosystems. Join this final webinar in the Women’s Month series to learn about the cutting edge findings of the Hot Birds Research Project team and how they can help us plan for conservation in a warming world.
Additional Details
Webinar link - https://zoom.us/j/94260499845?pwd=ZmFvcDNnZ1BkcEhQSW5DS3IrUlN4Zz09
Meeting ID - 942 6049 9845
Passcode - 319056
Check my time zone - https://www.starts-at.com/e/?t=1900&d=2021-03-31&tz=Africa/Johannesburg
Event platform - zoom
Organizer
Susie is a senior lecturer at the FitzPatrick Institute, University of Cape Town. She has been involved in the Hot Birds Research Project, an international collaboration investigating the impact of climate change on desert birds globally, since 2010. She leads the team’s research on birds’ behavioural responses to heat and consequences of these. Susie is a New Zealander and completed her undergraduate degrees in Ecology & Biodiversity and Classical Studies at Victoria University of Wellington in 2005, and her PhD on tactile sensory systems in birds at Massey University in 2010. She moved to South Africa and spent her first field season in the Kalahari over the summer of 2010/11 – a far cry from her PhD research on kiwi in the cold rainforests of New Zealand! The focus of Susie’s and her students’ field work is on the relationship between thermal biology and behavioural ecology, in particular the fitness consequences of behavioural thermoregulation.