We had our first meeting for the project “Scenarios for coexistence between men and dolphins on the Mediterranean French littoral” funded by Fondation de France. The website is operational and running, check it out here.

We organised a 2-day workshop on the metrics of longevity used in human and animal demography. The idea is to explore potential bridges between the two fields. Next meeting in April. The group is led by S. Cubaynes, a former PhD student of mine, who now holds a lecturer position at Montpellier University.

Ian Renner from the University of Newcastle in Australia, who visited us back in 2015, is with us again for a short 3-week visit.

Blaise defended his PhD I co-supervised with Pierre-Yves Quenette from ONCFS (manuscript here). Blaise studied the attitudes of the public toward brown bear presence and provided sound estimates of abundance and distribution for the species in the Pyrenees.

Frederic Gosselin, Etienne Rivot and I organised a 2-day workshop on issues in fitting hierarchical models in ecology. I gave a talk on “Local minima and multistate capture-recapture models”, slides and R code available on GitHub.

During the period 2013-2015, the NGO GIS3M led the GDEGeM project in which tons of data (on abundance and distribution among others) were collected on bottlenose dolphins.

We attended the conference organized by the French Ecological Society in Marseille. Our talk was ‘Conservation and management of large carnivores in France: A beneficial collaboration between ONCFS practitioners and CNRS researchers’.

Raluca Bancila, who visited us back in 2015, is with us again for a short 2-week visit. We will resume a project we started one year ago on the evaluation of demographic parameters of two related species of spadefoot toads (Pelobates syriacus and P. fuscus) from the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve, Romania, using capture-recapture models.

Laura Cowen from the Department of Math and Stat at University of Victoria (Canada) will be on a sabbatical with us for 3 months. We will be working on the applications of hidden Markov models to capture-recapture data.

This is a free adaptation of two (very) clever analyses made by others:

• The Star Wars Social Network by Evelina Gabasov in which program F# was mostly used to analyse the Star wars social networks