A warm welcome to our new PhD Student Kadambari Devarajan that just started the PhD program supervised by Chris Sutherland, University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMASS, MA) and Simone Tenan (MUSE). Kadambari will be based at the UMASS and will work on a four-year project entitled “Investigating the practical considerations of shifting the focus from single- to multi- species (community) monitoring”.

Focusing on the most widely applied methods in ecological monitoring, detection / non-detection data for estimating occupancy, and count data for estimating abundance, she will use multi-species datasets from across the globe from studies that have been designed with a single species in mind. Using simulations, she will evaluate the sensitivity of these common methods to heterogeneity in within-system but between-species traits such as detectability, distribution, abundance and/or home range size. She will attempt characterize what species characteristics influence most our ability to use data collected from multiple species, how best to design studies for multiple species, and finally provide guidance for both.

To find out more on Kadambary research and interests visit her personal website, and have a look at “ViXeN : View eXtract and aNnotate media, a simple (free and open source) tool designed and developed by Prabhu Ramachandran and Kadambary to facilitate easily viewing, adding, and annotating metadata associated with media. ViXeN has been recently published on Methods in Ecology and Evolution. The pdf of the paper is available here.

Twitter: @kadambarid

The EURING 2017 has been held in Barcelona, Spain, at the Natural History Museum.

The EURING conference is primarily focused on the development, understanding and integration of new methodologies in the analysis of capture-mark-reencounter data, commonly used to estimate population parameters. However, this time the conference included also applications of comparable methods to unmarked individuals, such as occupancy modelling and estimation of detection probabilities in monitoring programs.

The conference program is available here.

We gave a talk entitled ‘Modelling density-dependent population growth rate from individual encounter data‘, within the ‘Population Dynamics and Dispersal’ session. The work we presented was carried out in collaboration with Giacomo Tavecchia and Daniel Oro of the Population Ecology Group of the IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB, Spain), and with Roger Pradel of the CEFE/CNRS (France).

Photo: Ana Sanz-Aguilar

In our talk, we presented a new hierarchical formulation of the temporal symmetry approach (aka Pradel model, available in program Mark) that represents a model-based approach to formally test and quantify the strength of density dependence directly on population growth rate (as well as related vital rates) using capture-mark-reencounter data on open populations. In addition, the framework allows the estimation of temporal variance unexplained by density dependence, and can thus be used to quantify the relative contribution of density-dependent (intrinsic) and density-independent (extrinsic) factors affecting fluctuations of animal populations.

We illustrated the modelling approach with simulated data, to investigate the effectiveness of detecting density dependent effects on population growth rate, but also using real data on the Audouin’s gull, marked and resighted at the Ebro delta colony (Spain) by the Population Ecology Group of the IMEDEA.