Biodiversity and Conservation

Develop your knowledge about major conservation issues and their human and environmental drivers across a range of ecosystems. Gain the skills you’ll need to understand how we can balance human needs with efforts to address the biodiversity and climate crisis.

Course description This MSc course prepares you for a career protecting biodiversity in a range of natural, agricultural and urban ecosystems around the world. Throughout your course, you'll be in the field learning 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.

Fieldwork will form a large part of your learning. In our Field Biology module you'll gain hands-on experience of designing and conducting a project in the field, helping you to understand the challenges faced in real-world conservation projects.

You'll receive training in the principles of experimental design and data collection in an area of outstanding conservation and biodiversity interest, equipping you with the key skills to plan, manage and generate data from your own research.

Throughout your course, we’ll show you how environmental change can impact biodiversity and how the effective management of ecosystems can positively impact both biodiversity and the ecosystem itself.

You’ll also conduct an independent research project, spending three months researching an area of biodiversity or conservation that matches your interests and equips you 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.

Example previous research projects include:

Is land sparing or land sharing farming best for conservation of biodiversity and carbon in upland UK?

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

Biodiversity change under climate and environmental variation

Using eDNA data for biodiversity monitoring

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