As one of our always excellent department seminar, we had the chance to welcome Heath Smith from University of Washington, Center for Conservation Biology. Heath, together with his dog Chester with whom I became friend during the talk, is working with detection dogs on all sorts of important questions and organisms in conservation biology. Heath then headed to the Pyrénées with Nathalie Espuno to meet with our colleagues from the ONCFS bear (dream)team with whom we’re working on Blaise Piédallu’s PhD. They’re gonna try this technique there, no doubt the results will be of interest for our work on large carnivores!

I acted as the “president” on the PhD committee of Sophie Monsarrat who, with her supervisor Ana Rodrigues, kindly invited me. It was about the reconstruction of marine mammal’s historical distribution and abundance using historical data. Sophie did an amazing job during her PhD, have a look to her recent paper on the topic. Her presentation was just awesome, I wish I could give such vivid and fascinating talks, irrespective of the topic. Otherwise, her work reminded me of my current work on monk seals with Alex Karamanlidis from the MoM NGO and the talk I’m supposed to give at the ICCB2015 on the analysis of citizen science data. More soon.

Great news! Gilles Maurer will soon start his PhD on the links between wild and captive populations of Asian elephants using an interdisciplinary approach. This is a joint venture with the Beauval zoo and B. Mulot through the CIFRE framework that funds applied PhDs with non-academic partners.

Paméla Lagrange successfully defended her PhD co-supervised with M. Bélisle from the University of Sherbrooke on the ‘Drivers of survival and breeding dispersal using a capture-recapture framework in Tree Swallows - Québec’. The members of the committee (M. Festa-Bianchet, G. Gauthier, C. Barbraud, E. Cam) were unanimously amazed by both the ecological and methodological contributions of Paméla to the field. Congrats Pam!

I had the visit of Nina Santostasi from Italy to work for a few days on the estimation of striped dolphin abundance in the gulf of Corinth (in Greece). Nina is working with Giovanni Bearzi and Silvia Bonizzoni from the NGO Dolphin Biology and Conservation. Hopefully our collaboration will provide elements for the conservation of the species.

As part of the GdR EcoStat and our evolutionary demography group, we had a stimulating workshop on the quantification of individual heterogeneity in survival of wild populations using an approach recently developed by Hal Caswell. Hal attended the workshop with Lotte de Vries her new PhD student who will be leading the study.

We organised the first conference of the GdR EcoStat. We spent two lovely days in Lyon talking about ecological statistics with the hundred people who attended. The talks are available here. If you’d like to know more about our activities in the GdR, check out our website.

Laetitia Blanc succesfully defended her PhD on the conservation of lynx in France. Congrats Laeti! She had very nice feedbacks by the members of committee (X. Lambin, E. Marboutin, J. Linnell, M. Schaub and F. Bonadonna). Laetitia will be working for a few months with us on the estimation of lynx abundance in Norway (with J. Linnell) and with ONCFS to finish up a chapter of her thesis.

Welcome to our new master students Iago Bonnici and Julie Louvrier and Tamar Lok our new post-doc.

Our team has recently joined the department Biodiversity & Conservation at CEFE, a department that I have the pleasure to head now. We have moved offices and are now on the second floor. I have an office with a brand new parquet floor and red walls (that I chose and installed/painted myself, can you believe it?!). We had our office-warming party early March. Do not hesitate to come by and visit our new offices!