How do long-lived animals endure a changing, unpredictable world?
My work follows two threads: 1 how environmental change reshapes the lives of individual animals, and 2 whether their populations can adapt fast enough to persist. Below, the questions come first. The most relevant papers sit underneath them as evidence, and each thread ends with where I am taking it next.
– SEVERAL SPECIES, ONE QUESTION –
These species look unrelated, but I study them to answer the same question, on two timescales. Each leaves behind a different kind of evidence. And tells a part, of the same story.
The questions, and the work behind them
WITHIN LIFETIMES – DEMOGRAPHY
How does Environmental change ripple through survival, growth, and reproduction to shape a population’s fate?
When the environment shifts (ocean, atmosphere, human pressures), the first signs of trouble are not population decline. They are quiet changes in how long animals live, when they first breed, and how much they invest in their young.
I reconstruct these vital rates and life-history outcomes from sparse data and trace them back to specific drivers.
EVIDENCES
2026
Subtropical anticyclone impacts life-history traits of a marine predator
Geophysical Research Letters
2026
Environmental variability shapes life-history trade-offs within and between populations of long-lived seabird
Ecology Letters
2026
Drivers of age at first reproduction in the wandering albatross
Journal of Animal Ecology
2025
Longevity collapse in common dolphins: a growing conservation concern in the Bay of Biscay
Conservation Letters
2024
Addressing temporal trends in survivorship from cross-sectional sampling designs
Ecological Modelling – AWARD
WHERE I AM TAKING THIS
Most studies ask how the average environment is changing. I am increasingly convinced that it is more interesting to look at the growing variability. Long-lived species cope through demographic buffering until that capacity is overwhelmed. My next works asks when variance, not the mean, decides whether a population holds on.
ACROSS GENERATIONS – EVOLUTION
Can populations adapt quickly enough, through evolution, to persist as the climate outpaces them?
Measuring how a population responds today is only half the story. The harder question is whether that response is enough. Whether slow-breeding, long-lived animals can change across generations as fast as the world is changing. Using decades of individuals records and climate projections, I ask whether ecological flexibility and evolution together can keep these species in the game.
IN PROGRESS
SOON
Eco-evolutionary tracking of a shifting selection landscape
amplifies positive climate responses in a long-lived seabird
In preparation
WHERE I AM TAKING THIS
Human pressure (bycatch, size selective selection) is at once a demographic blow and an evolutionary force. I want to know whether our exploitation is quietly reshaping these animals’ biology, and whether that helps or hinders their chances of persisting. This is the thread I will build as a group leader.
ONE THREAD RUNNING THROUGH BOTH
Reading the demographic signal from the imperfect evidence wild animals leave behind.
Wild animals are almost impossible to follow directly and closely. So both questions rest on the same craft: drawing trustworthy conclusions from messy, indirect, second-hand evidences. Making the evidence speak, honestly and with its uncertainty intact is the through-line of the key questions above.
EVIDENCE
2026
Why 50-year studies are needed in a 3-year-grant world?
Nature Reviews Biodiversity
2022
Estimating bycatch from non-representative samples (II): pair-trawlers and common dolphins.
Frontiers in Marine Science
2022
Estimating cetacean bycatch from non-representative samples (I): a simulation study
Frontiers in Marine Science
2021
Flexible parametric modeling of survival from age-at-death data
Population Ecology – AWARD
WHY IT MATTERS
Thousands of threatened species will never have a clean perfect, long-term dataset. If we can assess their demographic health from the fragments they do leave, conservation can act for the many. Not just the well-studied few.