Marine Ecology and Conservation Group
Understanding how environmental change reshapes life in the ocean
Marine ecosystems are undergoing rapid environmental change driven by climate variability, human activity, and shifting ecological interactions. Our research seeks to understand how these pressures influence marine populations across space and time, and to develop the tools needed to predict future ecological responses. A central challenge in marine ecology is that detecting population change is not enough. To understand why populations increase, decline, or persist, we need to identify the ecological processes driving those changes. Our work focuses on identifying these mechanisms and incorporating them into more realistic population assessments and forecasting frameworks.
Research Themes
Processes driving population change
We study the mechanisms underlying spatial and temporal variation in marine populations. Our research examines how immigration, emigration, environmental variability, trophic interactions, and human pressures interact to influence demographic change across multiple spatial scales. Much of our work focuses on highly mobile marine species, including seabirds, which integrate ecological processes across large geographic regions and provide valuable insight into ecosystem change. By combining long-term demographic, movement, and ecological datasets, we investigate how processes operating across national and ecological boundaries influence population dynamics.
Improving population assessment tools
Conservation and management decisions are frequently made in data-limited systems where many demographic and ecological processes remain poorly quantified. Traditional population assessment approaches often simplify ecological systems by excluding processes such as dispersal, competition, and cumulative environmental pressures. Our research develops modelling frameworks that integrate these processes while explicitly accounting for uncertainty and incomplete data. We combine fragmented demographic information with biologically informed constraints derived from life-history theory to estimate realistic population dynamics and improve ecological forecasting. By incorporating uncertainty directly into model structure and prediction, our work aims to support more robust and transparent conservation decision-making under environmental change.
Policy and conservation relevance
We work closely with government agencies, conservation organisations, and environmental stakeholders to ensure our research remains relevant at the science–policy interface. Our work contributes to the development of evidence-based conservation strategies and environmental assessments, including those related to marine spatial planning, offshore renewable energy development, and the management of cumulative human impacts on marine ecosystems.
Approach
Our research combines:
- Long-term demographic monitoring
- Biologging and movement ecology
- Population and metapopulation modelling
- Quantitative ecological forecasting
- Life-history theory
- Bayesian and statistical modelling
- Ecosystem and food web approaches
By integrating these approaches, we aim to move from describing ecological change towards understanding and predicting the processes that drive it.
Join my group: I welcome enquiries about PhD and postdoctoral opportunities in my research group.
Image: Colony of common guillemots by Sam Langlois Lopez