The project delivered three major strands of work:
1. A conceptual contribution on resilience: A concise paper was developed to clarify how “demographic resilience” can be understood in terms of short-term (transient) population dynamics. The work identified common pitfalls in applying resilience metrics and proposed a practical way forward: to focus on how environmental change affects vital rates (survival, growth, reproduction) and then use structured models to forecast outcomes.
2. An analytical framework for climate impacts on yellow mongoose: Using long-term capture–recapture data from the Kalahari, I developed a set of Hidden Markov Models to estimate survival and demographic transitions under varying climatic conditions. These models were embedded in an individual-based simulation to forecast population trajectories under different climate extremes. The framework is modular, openly coded, and designed for reuse with other small carnivore datasets, making it a significant step towards transferable tools for climate-sensitive population modelling.
3. Temperature-driven drivers of life history in Doñana, antlions and Mediterranean shrub populations: Laboratory experiments tested how constant versus fluctuating thermal regimes affected the development, survival, and morphology of dune-dwelling antlions. Results showed that warming accelerates development but can increase mortality and deformities, while fluctuating day–night regimes partly reduce these negative effects. These findings offer rare mechanistic insights into how insects may cope with increasing heat-wave intensity. In Doñana, I developed field monitoring using individual-based demographic surveys from Doñana national park for several species of perennial shrubs experiencing rapid climate change.
Together, these achievements provide a coherent picture that spans theory, modelling, and empirical evidence, linking fundamental ecological processes with pressing climate challenges.
