Catharine Horswill

Catharine Horswill is a marine predator population ecologist whose research focuses on understanding how environmental change and human activity shape marine populations and ecosystems across space and time. Her work combines quantitative ecology, population modelling, and applied conservation science to identify the processes driving population change and to develop tools that support more realistic conservation and management decisions under environmental change.

Her research particularly focuses on marine bioindicator species, including seabirds, to investigate how climate variability, movement, connectivity, food web dynamics, and cumulative human pressures influence population dynamics. A major theme of her work is moving beyond describing ecological change towards understanding the mechanisms that drive it. She is especially interested in how large-scale ecological processes such as density-dependence, immigration, and cumulative environmental pressures affect marine populations, and how failing to account for these processes can bias conservation assessments and ecological forecasts.

Catharine also develops modelling approaches for data-limited systems, integrating fragmented demographic information with biologically informed constraints derived from life-history theory. Her work aims to improve ecological forecasting while explicitly accounting for uncertainty, with applications spanning marine conservation, environmental assessment, and sustainable ocean management.

Catharine began her academic career with a BSc in Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, followed by an MSc at the University of Oxford in collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey, where she studied links between prey availability and penguin demography. After gaining experience in industry as a project manager leading a marine predator research programme, she returned to academia to complete a PhD with the British Antarctic Survey and the University of Glasgow on the drivers of penguin population change.

She has held research positions at the British Trust for Ornithology, the University of Glasgow, and a jointly appointed fellowship at University College London and the Zoological Society of London Institute of Zoology. She currently holds a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, where she is developing mechanistic models to predict how seabirds and other marine bioindicator species respond to environmental change.

Further information about Catherine and her research is available on her Wordpress site.

Publications:

An up-to-date list of Catharine's publications is available on her Google Scholar profile. Please contact her if you would like copies of any papers that are not available open access.

Research Areas:

• Marine ecology
• Conservation biology
• Population dynamics
• Marine predators
• Sustainable ocean management