Awarded Young Scholar Fund grant

I have been awarded a €3.900 grant from the Young Scholar Fund for a pilot project in the Spanish Pyrenees to assess the effects of severe drought on fish persistence. Specifically, I want to understand how individuals and groups of fish deal with severe droughts and how phenotypic variation may impact population structure and persistence. This project will hopefully provide the basis for a long-term project whereby I will use an individual-based approach to understand how individuals and groups of fish cope with environmental change.

Presented at BES Impacts of extreme climatic events

The past years I have been bridging the fields of behavioural ecology with mechanistic perspectives of collective behaviour research. I have recently started to use these concepts to set up some projects to understand how fish populations deal with environmental change, including field work in the Spanish Pyrenees focused specifically on the role of individual heterogeneity in the context of severe effects of floods and droughts.

I have just returned from York where I have presented some of my ideas at the BES conference Impacts of extreme climatic events on ecosystems. It was a great meeting, with many in-depth group discussions about the effects of climatic events on different ecosystems and it was nice to be able to present and discuss my research plans with the broad diversity of people attending. Good to be back in the UK for a couple days as well!