ANNUAL REPORT 2020
SCIENTIFIC activity Research group: Synthesis
Research Area 1 POPULATION ECOLOGY
Current group members: PI: Professor Bernt-Erik Sæther Professor Cameron Ghalambor Researcher Marlène Gamelon Postdoc Hannah Froy Postdoc Rémi Fay Postdoc Thomas Kvalnes PhD candidate Lara Veylit PhD candidate Stefan Vriend
Aim: To apply stochastic models to understand processes affecting the dynamics of populations and phenotypes in fluctuating environments.
Bernt-Erik Sæther, Cameron Ghalambor Marlène Gamelon, Hannah Froy, Rémi Fay, Thomas Kvalnes, Lara Veylit, Stefan Vriend
Major scientific contributions Two important events involved members of this RG in 2020. Researcher Marlene Gamelon was from October 1 appointed as permanent researcher at CNRS, France. However, she will still keep 20 % of her position at CBD until the end of the center period. In addition, postdoc Hannah Froy was awarded a University Research Fellowship (URF) from The Royal Society of London for the project Eco-evolutionary consequences of individual heterogeneity in density dependence.
The ecology and demography of wild boar In November, Lara Veylit submitted her PhD thesis, entitled Causes and consequences of body growth variation in hunted wild boar populations, under the supervision of Bernt-Erik Sæther
and Marlène Gamelon. She focused her research on “growth”, a particularly interesting (and poorly studied) life-history trait linked to body size in adulthood, reproductive success, and longevity. Her main objective was to understand why body growth varies among populations and between individuals and the consequences of this variation. To reach this goal, she took advantage of data from individual long-term monitoring studies of wild boar Sus scrofa in France. This is an emblematic game species, living in different habitats, offering the opportunity to compare body growth patterns across contrasting environments in terms of habitat quality and hunting pressures. First, she estimated body growth early in life (until about 6 months of age) in different populations and assessed the effects of temperature, precipitations and density at birth on early-life growth (Figure 1).
Figure 1.Wild boar life cycle. Data on the number of removed individuals are collected during the hunting season (October-February) coinciding with the rut and gestation periods. Weather variables (temperature and precipitation) that influence early-life growth rates were collected during the birth peak, in April, and the period of early-life growth coincides with the capture period (which may vary slightly between sites) (from Veylit et al. 2020a). 10
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