Dr. Martijn van de Pol

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For my PhD (2006, cum laude) I studied life-history decisions in a long-lived shorebird on a tiny barrier island in the Netherlands. When my field experiments were flooded 3 years in a row, I decided to take this as a sign and switch fields to study the climate change ecology of birds. After a short stay at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, I first headed up north for a postdoctoral fellowship at the Norwegian University for Science & Technology to get acquainted with theory on stochastic population dynamics. Wondering where the sun had gone, I then headed down south to work as a research fellow at the Australian National University. There I got an opportunity for hands on experience with long-term field studies on iconic fairy-wrens. Although fairy-wrens have quite a reputation because of their extreme promiscuity and complex behavioural strategies, they are actually also a useful model system to study the mechanisms by which individuals and populations respond to climate change (they really, really love rain…). From 2013 onwards I was a group leader at the Australian National University. Most recently I moved to the NIOO-KNAW, in which my group is focussing on theoretical, empirical and comparative work–primarily on a variety of bird species—to further our understanding of how organisms respond to a rapidly changing environment. We are particularly interested in questions such as how climate extremes and variability impact individuals and populations, how human impacts accumulate on shorebirds populations, and understanding why some species are more sensitive to environmental change than others. Since 2013, I am also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Animal Ecology and since 2019 for Proceedings of the Royals Society B and I am a member of the board of the inter-institutional Centre for Avian Population Studies.

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