Short project description

The rewilding concept is advancing from a phase of demonstration to implementation. Many projects are introducing year-round de-domesticated livestock to degraded farmland, mimicking a process of wild grazing. Despite mounting evidence of insect declines, the impacts of wild grazing on process-mediating invertebrates – especially night-active predators, herbivores, and detritivores – are unclear. Saksfjed Vildmark is an emerging rewilding project in Lolland which presents a golden opportunity to monitor the impacts of rewilding and generate baseline data on ground-dwelling invertebrates.

The student will help to pilot a sensor-based sampling protocol to bring the monitoring of rewilding into the digital age. They will help to deploy micro-cameras with LED flash, and take charge of a pitfall trapping programme to compare novel technologies with established monitoring methods. They will develop skills in entomology and taxonomy, label insects in images, and address questions about novel monitoring methods and invertebrate ecology. The project will generate data and guidelines to support rigorous, scalable, sensor-based monitoring of ground-dwelling invertebrates.