Our research focuses on gaining a mechanistic understanding of how individuals and populations respond to changes in their environment in order to project how future change may alter both a population’s dynamics and evolutionary trajectory. ​

Breaking News

  • Flying over the Sahara Desert sounds difficult--and it is! Our latest paper by Jelle Loonstra in Ecology Letters shows that black-tailed godwits flying over the Sahara that encounter strong headwinds during northward migration are more likely to die than those not encountering headwinds. Given that northward flights over the Sahara have the lowest survival rates of any annual cycle event, this means that winds are especially important for godwit population dynamics.
  • In 2018, Science published a paper purporting to show that climate change has led to increases in nest predation rates on Arctic shorebirds, creating an ecological trap. Our reanalysis, just out this week in Science, suggests that those conclusions were incorrect and that climate change has not altered nest predation rates.
  • How do the severity of phenological mismatches vary geographically? Using data from the Arctic Shorebird Demographics Network, Eunbi Kwon undertook the herculean project of answering that question across six species of shorebirds and 16 field sites spread across the Nearctic. In our new paper in Ecological Monographs, Eunbi shows that mismatches are more severe in the eastern Canadian Arctic and that this may be contributing to the rapid declines of the shorebird populations breeding there. 
senner at mailbox.sc.edu
Department of Biological Sciences
University of South Carolina​
Coker Life Sciences 406
Columbia, South Carolina, U.S.A.