Aimara is a postdoc working on developing new functional connectivity metrics for carnivores in Europe as part of NaturaConnect. She is an expert in carnivore movement analyses and is developing multi-species spatially explicit movement models to better understand the role of species interactions when designing functional connectivity networks.
Ana just defended her PhD, where she assessed wolf range expansion using spatially explicit individual-based models. She is now joining the team as a postdoc focusing on biodiversity and dynamic N-mixture models using our soil fauna monitoring data.
Candela is a research assistant in our team. She manages the experiments and monitoring of dung-beetle and shrub interactions in the LIFECAST project in Doñana and the Kalahari. She also manages many of our datasets - and nothing would run without her!
Chiara is a Masters student from the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and will spend some months in our team to work on the demography of Iberian lynx as part of the MS thesis. She will focus on assessing reproduction.
Guillermo is a PhD student in the LIFECAST project. He is modelling how invertebrate-plant interactions scale up to affect ecosystem structure under global change. He did his MS thesis in our team working on developing an analytical framework to assess total numbers of roadkill across various vertebrate groups (co-supervised by Marcello D'Amico).
Hanna is postdoctoral researcher who is about to join us from the State Museum of Natural History in Lviv, Ukraine. Hanna is an entomologist, and will work on analysing soil fauna history traits, with a focus on Neuroptera. She will also work on assessing how lacewings respond to climate change.
John joined our team as a Marie Curie fellow. His ClimRes project explores how wildlife populations interact with their environment, how humans will affect them in the future, and how we can use this understanding to conserve biodiversity.
Lucía is an undergrad at Universidad Pablo de la Olavide and joined our team as a JAE intro intern. She is supporting our field and lab work on dung beetle and ant-lion life-histories.
Maria leads the teams. She is keen on investigating how predictions of population dynamics can be improved by accounting for trait dynamics, environmental and spatial patterning, and tradeoffs between survival and reproduction; and on potential evolutionary consequences of environmental change. You can download her CV here (last update: Oct 2023).
Sanne is a postdoc working on developing a Digital Twin for terrestrial ecosystems in Doñana Protected Area. She is an expert in demographic modelling and is developing multi-species spatially explicit demographic models to better understand how demographic feedbacks scale up to affect ecosystem processes.
Sonja is a JAE Intro student and is modelling the invertebrate diversity from our pitfall trapping in the Kalahari. She is also looking into assessing and modelling life-history dynamics of dung beetles in Doñana National Park.
Teresa is a PhD student at CREAF. She is developing individual-based models of interacting shrub populations to explore how traits, demography, and trophic interactions (with herbivores and seed predators) affect shrub resilience to drought. Her works includes individual monitoring of 4 shrub species in Doñana National Park.
Collaborators who are not at EBD full time
Beatrice is a PhD student based at the University of Pavia, Italy. She works on assessing demography and population dynamics of Alpine marmots in the Gran Paraiso National Park. Beatrice will spend one year with DEMOCAST learning all about demographic modelling.
Matt Clements is a PhD student at University of Sheffield. He is working on density structured population models, including data of shrub communities from Doñana National Park and invasive plants from the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains. He is collecting much of the landscape-level data in Doñana. Matt is taking on the challenge of parameterising such models for more complex life cycles that the annual species that have been traditionally used.
Monica received a Swiss National Science Foundation mobility fellowship to work as a post-doc in our lab, using individual-based models to predict effects of environmental changes on giraffe population viability. Find out all about her work with giraffes here.
Sara was an MS student and developed individual-based models of interacting rabbit and lynx populations.
Macarena was a JAE intern who helped to develop multi-state capture-recapture models for water voles.
Eva defended her PhD (Feb 2025) at the University of Zurich (and was a remote member of our team). She worked on lions and dewy pines and has been investigating (among other things) the role of space when assessing and projecting the effect of species interactions on population dynamics. Find out more here.
Louis defended his PhD (Jan 2025) at the University of Zurich (and was a remote member of our team). He has applied theoretical and empirical analyses to investigate how context-dependent changes in individual investment in survival vs. reproduction (aka. tradeoffs) affect population dynamics. He will soon move on to the University of Aarhus on a Swiss Mobility Postdoc Grant.