MammalWeb, an organisation started in the Department of Biosciences has been shortlisted for two Nature of Scotland awards: innovation and citizen science.

Leading ecologists from our Department of Biosciences and Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Germany have predicted in their latest research that bird communities will change worldwide in 2080 due to climate change, largely as result of shifting their ranges.

Our bioscientists are playing a key role in identifying the impact of climate change on plant and animal life.

Dr Adrian Brennan and a team of researchers have just published their latest paper in MDPI.

Congratulations to Professor Steve Willis and Kieran Lawrence on their paper just published in Global Change Biology.

Georgia Walsh, a third year Biological Sciences student performed a BPS-funded summer placement in Dr Paul Chazot's lab probing a potential new Durham University “spin out” drug for treating Parkinsons disease. Georgia is the deputy lead of the new Durham University Parkinsons Pals community support programme, the first in the UK.

Research led by Dr Paul Chazot on a new infrared light therapy that might have the potential to help people with dementia.

Our international consortium of academic researchers from South America, Asia and the UK, are seeking new therapeutic solutions to leishmaniasis and Chagas disease.

Wayne Dawson has been awarded a Darwin+ project funded by the Darwin Initiative (Defra), to assess climate change-mediated invasion risks posed by introduced plants and invertebrates on the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia.

Congratulations to Professor Rus Hoelzel on his recent research published in Biology Letters which also features in several news articles!

Prolonged dry periods and increased temperatures that result from anthropogenic climate change have been shown to increase the frequency and severity of wildfires in the boreal region. There is growing evidence that such changes in fire regime can reduce forest resilience and drive shifts in post-fire plant successional trajectories.

Asher may just look like a cute cuddly dog but he is much more than that. He, along with some of his canine friends, have been trained to sniff out Covid-19 in people and the initial results show they can do it very reliably. This is because a research team, involving Durham, has found that Covid-19 has a very distinct odour – which we as humans can’t smell – but the dogs’ super sniffing powers can detect it with up to 94 per cent accuracy.