Charlotte Walters

PhD Student

Curriculum Vitae:

September 2009–Present: PhD research student, Institute of Zoology and DICE University of Kent.
2009: iBats Project Assistant, Institute of Zoology.
2007-2008: MSc Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, Imperial College London.
2006: Research Assistant, Frontier, Tanzania.
2004: Research Assistant, CERF, British Columbia, Canada.
2003-2006: BSc Neuroscience, University of Manchester.
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Research Interests:

My PhD is looking at the current and future conservation status of European bats. Bats are an important component of biodiversity, comprising a fifth of all mammal species. They provide a number of essential ecosystem services such as insect regulation, pollination and seed dispersal, and evidence suggests they may act as an indicator of general ecosystem health. Since 2006, the Indicator Bat Program (iBats) has been collecting ultrasonic bat call data from car based surveys across Europe. My PhD will use this data to look at the current trends in bat populations as well as modelling habitat and climate associations of bat species to look at the potential impacts of future global climate change on bat species distributions and their future conservation status.

I am supervised by Kate Jones and Ben Collen at IoZ, Bob Smith at University of Kent, and Karen Haysom at the Bat Conservation Trust. I am funded by NERC with Bat Conservation Trust as a CASE partner.
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