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.

Just submitted a big proposal to the Biodiversa call. It was great to write this project with Hervé Fritz who, without a doubt, knows how to write grant applications! If successful, we’ll be working on the social and ecological dimensions of connectivity in lynx habitats.

I had the visit of Sarah Benhaim and Lucile Marescot (a former PhD student of mine), both post-doc at the Leibniz Institute in Berlin supervised by Stephanie Kramer-Schadt. It was an exciting week that we spent discussing and analyzing data on the spotted hyenas from the Serengeti National Park with questions at the interface of demography, sociality and epidemiology.

I’m so delighted to announce that Julie will start a PhD in October with me, jointly working with Eric Marboutin and Christophe Duchamp from ONCFS. There will be also collaborations with John Linnell from NINA.

My 2 master students finished their internships. I was so lucky to have them and work with them. Iago worked on the estimation of abundance using bilateral photo-identification capture-recapture data, with an application to bottlenose dolphins.

We had our annual department day; for the occasion, we invited Anne-Caroline Prévot. Anne-Caro is having a fascinating scientific pathway, as she started with a PhD in bird population dynamics and now she’s working on topics requiring skills in environmental psychology.