PUBLICATIONS

I have been invited to write a piece of content for the Journal Club of Nature Reviews Biodiversity. In this contribution, I discuss on the necessity to rely on long-term animal monitoring. Not as a luxury. But as a necessity. I built this contribution on two papers that shaped my thinking over the past years:
– Weimerskirch, H. Linking demographic processes and foraging ecology in wandering albatross – Conservation implications. Journal of Animal Ecology
– Barbraud, C. and Weimerskirch, H. Emperor penguins and climate change. Nature

In this review, I provide best practices to infer demographic rates from stranded marine mammals. I define the stranding scheme as a process that distorts the age-specific patterns of animal population through a compounded bias selection. Then I exemplify how in the litterature people overcame this bias through a combination of design and mode-based approaches. This work is currently in review at Marine Mammal Science, but a preprint is already available for more insights.

In this work, I leverage a 50-year capture-mark-recapture dataset of the most iconic seabird of the Southern Ocean: the Wandering Albatross. This top predator experienced severe population depletions and environmental changes over the last decades. Here I show, using Hidden-Markov-Models and Absorbing Markov chains, that the age at recruitment diminished in this population due to a combination of demographic and environmental factors that mainly act at birth, creating long-lasting effects.
This study is currently in a second round of revisions.

Dr. Sun led this study, where she demonstrates the power of atmospheric indices to explore seabird demography. I provided crucial support for data analysis and interpretation. Here we show that the Wandering Albatross is impacted differently by the Mascarene High—an anticyclonic system—depending on sex and life stage, mainly due to wind processes.
This work is in the first round of revisions.

This is the final opus of my cross-sectional work on dolphins, my masterpiece. After developing two groundbreaking methodological frameworks, I finally applied them to uncover a hidden ecological crisis: common dolphins in the Bay of Biscay are experiencing « longevity collapse, » losing seven years of expected lifespan in just two decades. While traditional abundance surveys showed stable populations, I revealed the devastating truth: this population is a demographic sink. I pioneered the use of stranding data as an early warning system, creating the demographic equivalent of a smoke detector that detects population collapse before it’s too late. This represents the culmination of years of methodological innovation finally bearing fruit in urgent conservation reality.

This work represents the second chapter in my exploration of cross-sectional demographic analysis. Here, I overcome the most restrictive assumption in survival analysis derived from age-at-death data, making it possible—for the first time—to estimate relative vital rates from cross-sectional sampling. This breakthrough enables researchers to assess population viability directly from demographic rates, opening new pathways for conservation science.

It has been awarded by the International Society for Ecological Modelling.

Our goal was to write twin articles simultaneously. One was the methodological development (led by Dr. Authier) and one was the ecological application. I led the ecological application study. I used highly biased observer data, with approximately 2-5% fishing observer coverage of total fishing effort, along with the new MrP methodology and fishing effort data. For the first time, we demonstrate that bycatch can be quantified at a very fine spatiotemporal scale.

Dr. Authier led this methodological development, where he uses Multilevel Regression with Post-stratification (MrP) for bycatch quantification for the first time. I assisted him by running analyses, linking results to the ecology of dolphins, oceanographic conditions, and by contributing to the writing.

I developed a new flexible bayesian regression framework to estimate survival from age-at-death data. This work is the pioneer of my contribution to the field of cross-sectional studies.

It has been recognized with the award of the best Young Author 2022.