User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
In my study, I seek to compare the daily behaviours of dabbling ducks in an engineered urban wetland to similar species in natural environments. Urban wetland areas (both natural and constructed) provide important benefits by filtering pollutants and pathogens from wastewater, mitigating flood risk, absorb carbon from the atmosphere and providing aesthetically pleasing recreational areas. While beneficial to human-kind, these areas are also incredibly biodiverse, especially compared to surrounding urbanized areas. Urban wetland areas are often targeted for development in cities looking to squeeze what they can from the available land, putting diverse ecosystems at risk of destruction.
The ecological processes my research focuses on would be behavioural ecology and resource ecology. While the scope of my study obviously isn’t comprehensive enough for a “real” ecological study, I hope that by comparing the behaviours of ducks living in urban wetland environments to those in more natural settings I can provide an argument for the protection of existing wetlands, and perhaps for increased development of new wetland areas in urban settings through my hypothesis that the ducks I study will exhibit similar behaviour patterns to their comparators in natural environments. Significant differences in behaviour between populations may produce additional hypotheses for future investigation into the construction/design techniques employed.
Keywords: Engineered Wetlands; Dabbling Ducks; Time-Energy Budget
