Senior Ecological Statistician

Fixed term 12-month contract, 4 days per week Hutton Level 6 - Salary £44,434 (part time pro rata)

Biomathematics & Statistics Scotland (BioSS) seeks to appoint a Senior Ecological Statistician on a fixed term contract for 12 months from 01/09/2026 – 31/08/2027. This will be maternity leave cover for an existing role. Candidates will have an interest in movement modelling and working on applied and methodological research relating to the impacts of offshore renewable energy on seabirds and marine mammals.

BioSS is legally part of The James Hutton Institute, a member of the SEFARI (Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institutes) collective, and offers a stimulating working environment, with 60 staff and students at four locations, collaborating on applications in offshore renewables, environmental science & ecology, plant & crop science, animal health & welfare, and human health & nutrition.

The UK Government recently launched its Clean Power Mission with a commitment to accelerating to net zero by delivering clean power by 2030, including 43-50 GW of offshore wind, and to restoring nature. In the power generation sector, progress in switching to renewable energy has accelerated in recent years, with renewables generating more electricity in the UK than fossil fuels since 2020.

Legislation protecting the marine environment requires that offshore renewable energy devices are delivered in a sustainable manner. Offshore renewable developments have the potential to impact protected seabird and marine mammal populations, principally from collisions with turbine blades, displacement from important habitat, barrier effects to movement and noise disturbance.

The Offshore Renewables Team (OSR) in BioSS carries out quantitative research on the impacts of offshore renewable energy on seabirds and marine mammals in collaboration with the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) and many other organisations. This position offers the opportunity to work in a friendly, inclusive team (currently 11 staff + 3 PhD students) within three consortia on interesting and innovative long-term research projects, which have substantial statistical and software development components.

This is an opportunity to be involved in developing statistical approaches using novel ecological data to solve real‑world problems relating to the impacts of offshore renewables on seabirds and contribute to an extensive research portfolio.

Funded by the Offshore Wind Evidence and Change Programme (OWEC ), Predators and Prey Around Renewable Energy Devices (PrePARED ) is providing critical insight into cumulative effects from large scale developments for key species. Surveys are collecting concurrent data to characterise and quantify relationships between predators and prey in the context of a changing environment. Movement models have been developed using Hidden Markov Models, to investigate broad-scale interactions of GPS-tracked seabirds and their prey.

These movement models characterise the role of prey in driving seabird behaviour across different species and will be developed further in the coming year to investigate the effect of offshore wind farms on these predator‑prey relationships. This role contributes in the following ways to the project:

• Lead an ongoing project task on movement modelling of seabirds, and conduct movement modelling analysis
• Write a paper on the analysis and submit this to a pre‑print server by 31/03/27
• Contribute as a co‑author to a complementary paper on spatial modelling
• Submit data products and outputs to the Marine Data Exchange, including writing metadata files using the MEDIN format
• Provide written quarterly updates and presentations to the project and funders
• Attend project-wide meetings
• Contribute to the two‑day end‑of‑project knowledge exchange Symposium in January 2027, aimed at external stakeholders
• Supervise level 5 statisticians working on the project
• Liaise with external collaborators

Funded by the Scottish Government Offshore Wind Directorate, the Seabird Foraging and Avian Flu (BRAIDS) project is examining the effects of reductions in seabird…