Mapping urban and rural British hedgehogs
This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is under discussion with a student but not yet confirmed. It may be co-supervised with Silviu Petrovan.
The National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme aims to provide robust population estimates for the beloved hedgehog.
Despite being the nation’s favourite mammal, there's a lot more to learn about hedgehog populations across the country. We do know that, although urban populations are faring better than their rural counterparts, overall hedgehogs are declining across Britain, so much so that they’re now categorised as Vulnerable to extinction. -- NHMP
The People's Trust for Endangered Species has been coordinating the programme. For the purposes of this project, we have access to:
- GPS data from over 100 tagged hedgehogs collected by Lauren Moore during her PhD to build predictive movement models.
- OpenStreetMap data about where hedgehogs probably shouldn't be (e.g. middle of a road) to help with species distribution modelling
- PTES also run the Hedgehog Street program which has the mapped locations of hedgehog highways across the UK to assess how effective they are.
- A new high-res map of the UK's hedgerows and stonewalls from Google DeepMind and Drew Purves.
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1st Jun 2025
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ideasRelated News
- Remote Sensing of Nature / Jan 2023