Ms Madeline Richards

I am currently working on a PhD on the ecological function of trees outside woodland on the colonisation of woodland sites, funded by Forest Research. This research aims to determine whether trees outside of woodland (including hedgerows, small groups of trees and lone trees) affect the ability of different species to colonise newly created woodland sites. More information about this can be found here: https://www.wren-project.com/trees-outside-woodlands.html.

I previously studied at Edinburgh Napier University, completing a Masters degree in Wildlife Biology and Conservation. In my research I studied nature relatedness in citizen science participants, co-creating the Our Trees project for the Church of Scotland. My undergraduate degree is in Biology from the University of Oxford. My dissertation focused on orb web spiders and was later published in Animal Biology.

Published paper:

• Richards, M. A., & Hesselberg, T. (2020). No edge effect on quantity of prey captured in the forest-dwelling tetragnathid orb spider Metellina mengei. Animal Biology, 71(2), 169-181. https://doi.org/10.1163/15707563-bja10050