Demographic Responses tO Varying Environments under climate change

Ongoing climate change has altered both mean and short-term temporal variability of environmental conditions (such as temperature or food resources).

While there is strong evidence that wild populations are deeply influenced by changes in the mean environmental conditions and respond accordingly (e.g., shifts in phenology, in species ranges), population responses to changes in the magnitude of environmental fluctuations are poorly understood. This knowledge is, however, crucial to better predict and anticipate climate change impacts on biodiversity.

Hosted at the Institute of Mathematics of Bordeaux (University of Bordeaux), the project “DROVE” will be coordinated by Christie Le Coeur, a specialist in population ecology, who will benefit from the supervisor’s (Dr. F. Barraquand) expertise in ecological statistics and theory.

This project aims to provide a robust statistical and theoretical framework to unravel the effects of changes in environmental variability on dynamics of wild populations, and to characterise the demographic mechanisms responsible for their persistence under climate change.This goal will be achieved by defining metrics to measure population persistence and demographic strategies in a variable but also density-dependent environment (when population growth slows down as population density increases) as previous work on variable environments has ignored this almost ubiquitous population regulation.

The researcher will then build population models with data from long-term, individual-based population datasets of a well-studied species across Europe, the great tit (Parus major), to explain intra- and inter-population variations in demographic strategies and persistence in varying environments.

Combining long-term empirical surveys with state-of-the-art model development, this project will provide statistical tools solidly grounded in population dynamics theory to understand environmental variability effects on wild populations under climate change.