{"id":2541,"date":"2018-04-09T16:12:41","date_gmt":"2018-04-09T16:12:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/?p=2541"},"modified":"2018-04-09T16:12:41","modified_gmt":"2018-04-09T16:12:41","slug":"congratulations-to-dr-lydia-tiller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/2018\/04\/09\/congratulations-to-dr-lydia-tiller\/","title":{"rendered":"Congratulations to Dr Lydia Tiller"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Huge congratulations to Dr <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/sac\/current-students\/research-students\/dice\/p-t\/tiller_lydia.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lydia Tiller<\/a> who successfully passed her <em>viva voce<\/em> after being a research student at DICE for the past four years. Her thesis, supervised by Dr <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/sac\/staff-profiles\/profiles\/conservation-biology\/academic-staff\/smith_bob.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bob Smith<\/a> and Dr <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/sac\/staff-profiles\/profiles\/conservation-biology\/academic-staff\/humle_tatyana.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tatyana Humle<\/a>, was entitled &#8216;Understanding how land-use change in the Trans-Mara District in Kenya is driving human-elephant conflict and elephant movement.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>The Trans-Mara District (2,900 km\u00b2) in Narok County, Kenya, neighbours the world-famous Masai Mara National Reserve and is an important dispersal area for elephants (<em>Loxodonta africana<\/em>) and other wildlife. Wildlife is attracted to the area due to Nyekweri Forest, which holds important resources including salt licks. The Mara and Trans-Mara are linked by\u00a0<u>&gt;<\/u>25 natural pathways which enable seasonal migration of elephants. However, unlike the Masai Mara, the Trans-Mara is unprotected and experiences high levels of habitat transformation through land clearing. The area also has high agricultural potential and a growing human population. Encroachment of agricultural land has destroyed and fragmented elephant habitat and increased conflict with local farmers, predominantly through crop-raiding. Crop-raiding has highly negative impacts on local farmers and creates fear and anger towards elephants, further intensifying conflict and resulting in retributive killing.<\/p>\n<p>In her research, Dr Tiller studied land-use change in the area and looked at the impact of large-scale human influx into elephant areas, whilst monitoring elephant movement patterns. Her research has proved crucial to properly understand and manage human-elephant conflict and to ensure effective future land-use planning. Since submitting her PhD thesis in December, Dr Tiller has been working as the Research and Science Manager for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.savetheelephants.org\/our-projects\/#ste-portfolio|humans-elephants|1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Human-Elephant Coexistence programme<\/a> at Save The Elephants, based in Tsavo, Kenya.<\/p>\n<p>She was examined by Professor <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/sac\/staff-profiles\/profiles\/conservation-biology\/academic-staff\/davies_zoe.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Zoe Davies<\/a> (DICE) and Dr <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chesterzoo.org\/conservation-and-science\/our-team\/alex-zimmermann\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Alexandra Zimmermann<\/a> (Chester Zoo).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Huge congratulations to Dr Lydia Tiller who successfully passed her viva voce after being a research student at DICE for the past four years. Her &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/2018\/04\/09\/congratulations-to-dr-lydia-tiller\/\">Read&nbsp;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40284,"featured_media":2542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6599,124,70,6600],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2541"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40284"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2541"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2543,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2541\/revisions\/2543"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}