We organised the second conference of the GdR EcoStat. We spent two lovely days in Montpellier talking about ecological statistics with the hundred people who attended. The talks are available here.

Among the papers we published lately, I’d like to emphasize two contributions on the conservation of brown bears with some eminent colleagues: Karamanlidis, A.A., M. de Gabriel Hernando, L. Krambokoukis, O.

The GIS3M held an international workshop in Marseille on the conservation of Bottlenose dolphin conservation and monitoring in the North-Western Mediterranean Sea. This was the opportunity to discuss the results of the GDEGeM project on the same topic.

Jean-Dominique Lebreton went on retirement, and we could not let him go without organizing something in his honor. Jean-Do had a tremendous influence in the field of statistical ecology with important contributions in (among others) multivariate analyses, software developments, population dynamics, and capture-recapture methods.

Taking the opportunity of Ian Renner’s visit, we organized thanks to the GdR EcoStat a conference on the recent advances in the modeling of species distribution. We were lucky to have the cream of researchers in the domain with Julien Papaïx, Joseph Chipperfield, Ian Renner, Joern Pagel, Bob O’Hara, Laura Pollock and Damaris Zurell.

Ian Renner from the University of Newcastle in Australia spent some time with us while on a sabbatical. We worked together on developing a method to combine sources of information on species distribution.

I had the visit of Raluca Bancila a research scientist from Romania. We investigated spatio-temporal environmental variation in and individual heterogeneity on emigration/immigration rates of the troglophile harvestmen species Paranemastoma silli with capture-recapture models.

We visited our colleagues from Dolphin Biology and Conservation (Giovanni Bearzi, Silvia Bonizzoni, Nina Santostasi ‎and‎‎ Eva Greene). Lots of discussions on future projects about the estimation of striped, bottlenose and common dolphins abundance, their distribution in the gulf of Corinth (Greece) and their interactions with fishermen.

I attended the International Congress on Biological Conservation that was held in my home town Montpellier. The students of our team were on fire and talked about their exciting work. Gilles presented a bio-economic model to study the population dynamics of Asian captive elephants, a nice example of how to explicitly incorporate interactions between captive and wild populations in species management.