Philip Stephens

I use predictive population ecology to inform biodiversity conservation and wildlife management. In pursuit of a better science of predictive population ecology, my research is focused on four interacting themes. First, to make predictions, ecologists need a robust understanding of available data. Ecological data are noisy, however, demanding a careful treatment of uncertainty and cautious inference. I am interested in understanding uncertainty and its sources in ecological data, and in methods to make robust inferences from data. Second, baseline data often come from biodiversity monitoring, and I am interested in monitoring techniques and their interpretation. Third, there is no fundamental theory to guide predictions about how populations will respond to change – but there is a fundamental theory to make predictions about how individuals will respond to change: natural selection. By understanding how natural selection operates and influences individual strategies, we can strengthen the predictions we make about populations, whose fates are the sum of the fates of their constituent individuals. Fourth, populations do not exist in a vacuum, so I am also interested in species interactions – especially predator-prey interactions and their energetic underpinnings.

March 2022