Aurélie is a PhD student studying the conservation ecology of the natterjack toad (Bufo calamita) at a number of sites in Co. Kerry South West Ireland. The project is attempting to place the toads in an ecosystem context - what does that mean? The main aim of Aurélie's study is to investigate how toad populations are influenced by their biotic (predation) and abiotic (habitat complexity) environments. Among the Kerry populations a gradient of habitat complexity has been established from sites where there are many ponds with interlinking drains to sites with single isolated ponds. The aim is to determine whether this gradient of environmental complexity (in a landscape context) can explain the survival of toads from eggs through to toadlets. Aurelie is also investigating to what extent the survival of the toad tadpoles is determined by the predator burden of ponds that are constructed through conservation efforts. Another major aim is to determine whether the some of the kerry sites function as metapopulations and how do the toads contribute to the functioning of the sand dune systems of which they are a part.

e-mail: aurelieaubry@yahoo.fr

Órla McLaughlin is currently working towards her PhD at University College Cork, Ireland. Her PhD is concerned with the food web structure of terrestrial invertebrate communities and how biodiversity change affects the temporal dynamics of food web structure and ecosystem functioning (primary productivity and decomposition). A combination of both empirical and theoretical approaches is being used to explore food web dynamics and the consequences of species loss. Órla's fieldwork is being carried out in the Gearagh, near Macroom, County Cork, Ireland (51052'N 009001'W). She is manipulating the food web structure of small replicate islands within this riverine system and exploring the effects on ecosystem functioning. The Gearagh is a mixed deciduous alluvial woodland in the floodplain of the River Lee. It is one of the last semi-natural forested floodplains in Europe and is unique in Ireland.

e-mail: o.mclaughlin@mars.ucc.ie

Roz's background is mainly in population ecology. She completed her BSc (Hons) in Zoology at the University of Glasgow and her MSc in Ecology at the University of Aberdeen. Since then she has worked on the dynamics of infectious diseases in wild rodent populations in Kielder Forest and feral goat maternal time budgets on the Isle of Rum, both with the University of Liverpool. As part of the Soay Sheep Project rut behaviour and vegetation analysis were undertaken on St Kilda, while work at the Macaulay Institute included observing social and foraging behaviour, diet choice and composition in domestic sheep and goats, red deer habitat use and aspects of alpine willow conservation. An interest in marine biology was also gained through her work on deep water coral behaviour and brittlestar growth at Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory. Roz hopes this wide range of expertise will provide a good basis for her PhD and may help formulate some interesting questions over the next three years. Roz is supervised by Dr. Mark Emmerson and Prof. John O'Halloran.

Nadine is a PhD student with a background in environmental policy and ecological economics. Her research is part of a Science Foundation Ireland funded project examining biodiversity change in the Irish uplands under different management scenarios. Nadine has a strong interest in human-environment interactions and inter-disciplinary research. She will work on the socio-economic factors driving biodiversity change in the Kerry uplands including land use change, farm management systems and the policy environment. Her aim is to illicit local stakeholders' understanding of biodiversity and to develop acceptable stakeholder future scenarios for reconciling rural development, agriculture, recreation and biodiversity in the uplands. Nadine is supervised by Dr. Eileen O'Rourke.

Nessa was recently awarded an IRCSET postdoctoral fellowship and will join the Biodiversity Research group in January 2006. Nessa is a graduate of Trinity College and completed her MSc (Agr) at UCD. After a couple of years as a research assistant she returned to UCD and completed her PhD in 2004, under the supervision of Tas Crowe and with advice from Dave McGrath of GMIT. Her research focuses on the relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and habitat structure. She spent 2005 working with John Bruno's team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where her work focused on characterising the effects of loss of predator biodiversity on grazer and algal assemblages. She is also collaborating with Jonathon Grabowski (Gulf of Maine Research Institute) examining effects of the loss of harvested predatory crabs on oyster populations.

At UCC, Nessa will continue to test models based on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. In particular, she will address the effects of loss of diversity at multiple trophic levels. This will include a series of factorial manipulations of predator identity and diversity in the field. These experiments will test for independent and interactive effects of loss of species on community structure, primary and secondary production and nutrient cycling in mussel dominated intertidal assemblages.

e-mail: n.oconnor@ucc.ie

Marion graduated from UCC with a degree in Zoology, followed by an M.Sc. in Environmental Management at the University of Ulster. Having worked as a project scientist preparing EIAs for a couple of years, she decided to return to UCC to study field ecology. She was recently awarded funding by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology to undertake a PhD looking at the consequences of biodiversity change in a marine food web at Lough Hyne, Co.Cork. The project will use a mixture of field-based approaches to document patterns of body size, abundance, food web structure (trivariate patterns) and metabolic rates of species from the lough. By perturbing the real food web through large-scale species removal experiments, we will also investigate how the loss of three important consumer species; the purple sea urchin, Paracentrotus lividus, the spiny sea star, Marthesterias glacialis and the velvet swimming crab, Necora puber, would affect the stability and the ecosystem functioning of the Lough Hyne food web.