Alongside her consultancy work, Rachel carries out independent research projects focusing on bats.
Building on from her masters thesis in 2020, Rachel is currently looking at sexual size dimorphism in UK bats and how foraging habitat type and foraging strategy may drive size dimorphism. June 2022 will see her second year of static detector monitoring in 20 woodlands across England to look at the immediate impacts of woodland coppicing and management on bat species diversity and levels of activity in a before/after comparison study. The equipment for this latter project was kindly funded by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species.
Throughout 2021 Rachel was involved with writing an academic paper on developing a framework for indicators to monitor the success or otherwise of climate change adaptation interventions on the natural environment. Led by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), this paper was published in March 2022.
J.W. Pearce-Higgins, L.H. Antao, R.E. Bates, K.M. Bowgen, C.D. Bradshaw, S.J. Duffield, C. Ffoulkes, A.M.A. Franco, J. Geschke, R.D. Gregory, M.J. Harley, J.A. Hodgso, R.L.M. Jenkin, V. Kapos, K.M. Maltby, O. Watts, S.G. Willis, M.D. Morecroft (2022). A framework for climate change adaptation indicators for the natural environment. Ecological Indicators, 136 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2022.108690