Projects as PI

Concerns about biological invasions have driven efforts to understand what makes some species successful invaders. However, predicting which species will become invasive and how much they will spread remains difficult due to limited understanding of the complex interactions between species traits and the environment. Although ecological niche models, which predict species distribution based on environmental conditions, are widely used, they often fail to account for species that thrive outside expected niches. This limits their predictive power. The project aims to fill these gaps by studying how species traits impact key assumptions of these models, such as niche stability and equilibrium with the environment. This will be done using global bird distribution data, molecular phylogenetics, and advanced ecological analyses. 

Human-driven rapid environmental changes are causing massive biodiversity loss, often focusing conservation on rare species. However, some common species, which play key ecosystem roles, are also declining rapidly for poorly understood reasons. This projects studies the jackdaw (Corvus monedula), a socially intelligent bird that is declining in heavily urbanized parts of Europe despite being globally common.  The reasons behind such declines are not completely understood but could be related to an innate fear to humans, which would interfere in their daily activities and ultimately reduce their survival and breeding success. To start addressing this hypothesis, we propose to analyse the spatiotemporal patterns of habitat use of individuals in a highly populated urban area. 

Novel environments can generate sudden mismatches between individual’s phenotypes and the environment causing maladaptation and local extinction. Environmental similarity between the place of origin and introduction of alien species has been thus considered as an important driver of invasion success. However, recent evidence is accumulating that some species may also have notable success in areas climatically distinct from those occupied in its native ranges. This project aims to analyse how variation in species-specific traits can allow species to deal with environmental mismatches and how this can affect acuracy of species distribution models. 

Awareness of biological invasion impacts and the critical importance of evidence-based decision making have led to a persistent effort to understand the factors driving invasion success so as to be able to predict invasion outcomes. To this end, a range of modelling tools has been developed. Among them, species distribution models (SDMs) play a critical role in invasion risk assessments.  In this project, two unresolved challenges faced by SDMs when applied to the biological invasion process are examined: how (1) species’ association with human-modified habitats in native ranges and (2) intraspecific niche variation shape the distribution of invasive species at biogeographical scales and how these effects influence the reliability of predictions of invasion risk.