Student projects

Animal welfare in a social life cycle assessment – A contribution to more holistic sustainability assessments (2021)

Environmental sustainability and animal welfare in animal production systems has increasingly raised concern among e.g. the public, politics and research. However, in sustainability assessments of animal production systems, animal welfare is rarely taken into consideration.

A literature review was conducted to investigate how animal welfare aspects could be incorporated into a social life cycle assessment. The result of the literature review was applied to a case study to compare the animal welfare impact in Swedish and Danish conventional pig production.

Read the study here and find more information and contact details here.

Frida Edman, MSc in Environmental Science
Supervisors: Søren Faurby (BioEnv, UGOT) and Serina Ahlgren (RISE)

Does fruit colour affect the geographical distribution of palms (2020)
Different fruit colours attract different types of feeding animals with different ability to spread the seeds. Here we investigated if palms with fruit colour that mainly attract more mobile animals have a larger geographical spread.

Adrian Hill, MSc in Biology
Supervisor: Christine Bacon, GU

Relative impact of individual on global biodiversity loss (2020)
In this project I am examining supply chain data to determine what products we in Europe buy that have the biggest impact on biodiversity loss in hotspots, using land use as a proxy.

Louisa Durkin, MSc in Biology
Supervisors: Allison Perrigo GU, Alexandre Antonelli GU, Kew Gardens, Kimberly Nicholas LU

Effects of habitat fragmentation on conservation efforts of two threatened plant species, Eryngium maritimum and Mertensia maritima (2019)
The thesis is intended to support conservation efforts of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Naturvårdsverket) by examining the impact of habitat fragmentation on the fitness of Eryngium maritimum and Mertensia maritima. In order to investigate the potential effects of inbreeding depression on the declines of populations, cross-pollinations were done on plants of both species. The project was done in cooperation with the Gothenburg Botanical Garden and Länsstyrelsen in Gothenburg and on the Koster Islands.

Hanna Schork, MSc in Biology
Supervisors: Mats Havström and Mari Källersjö, Botaniska 

Is prey defaunation a potential cause of carnivore range loss and eventual extinction? (2018)
Defaunation has been emphasized as a likely threat to the conservation of carnivores, however not much is known. A new diet database was generated in collaboration with Owen Middleton for the terrestrial members of the order Carnivora having mammals as a primary prey item, resulting in 20170 diet records collected from 566 published literature sources. To estimate the potential threat to carnivores from the loss of their prey, overlap range maps of predator and their primary and secondary prey species were created and these were compared to maps where prey species classified as vulnerable or worse by the IUCN were removed.

Hanna Svensson, MSc in biology
Supervisor: Sören Faurby, GU

Applications of next-generation sequencing data for a population genomics study of Lesser whitethroats (2019)
The project attempts to shed light on the taxonomical conundrum that is the Lesser Whitethroat (Sylvia curruca) species complex, by employing whole-genome sequencing data, especially focusing on single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP).   The thesis serves as a foundation for further studies of the relationships between different Lesser Whitethroat taxa.

Laima Bagdonaite, MSc in Biology
Supervisor: Urban Olsson GU