Bio-sustainable solutions to global challenges

Applying evolutionary biology to address global challenges

Macroecological analysis of biological global change response

Global change dynamics in common European and North American breeding birds

The research' approach seeks to integrate spatially explicit indicators of climate and land use in explaining change in population size on short time scales, and subsequently link these short term effects to long-term change in population size by use of various population traits such as migratory behaviour, climatic niche and diet. This allows drawing a general picture of the impact of environmental change and how it various between and within species.

This project investigates environmental drivers of recent continent wide population trends in European and American songbirds. Population trend data comes from long-term monitoring schemes carried out across Europe and North America. The project builds on research carried out in my MSc thesis in collaboration with European Bird Census Council and the Pan-European Common Bird Monitorin Scheme.

History and current population make-up in a centre of endemism

A central component in understanding populations' ability to adapt to anthropogenic environmental change is to understand how past environmental change has shaped populations current genetic and phenotypic make-up. In this project I explore how environmental change up through time shapes genetic and morphological variation of montane bird populations. 

The bird populations are all situated in the Eastern-Arc mountains in Eastern Africa. These old mountains are a unique centre of endemism of biodiversity. In these mountains climate seems to have been unusually stable while glacial cycles have had strong impacts in many other areas.

Synthesizing population response to major actors of environmental change

One major obstacle in foreseeing the overall effects of current global change on biodiversity is the fact that many different changes are happening at the same time. Populations do not just experience change in climatic conditions, but also habitat alteration, pollution, new species and altered harvesting patterns.

By combining research reviews on each driver's impact a comprehensive framework  for population responses can be sought for, and potential interactions between environmental change drivers highlighted.

Selection under multidimensional environmental change More to come