Vaishnavi PURUSHOTHAM

PhD student in the Tit team working with Celine Teplitsk.

Paul CUCHOT

Doctorant

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Supervised by Céline Teplitsky and Pierre-Yves Henry (MNHN Paris)

CEFE/CNRS

Campus du CNRS

1919, route de Mende
34293 Montpellier 5

Tél : +33/0 4 67 61 xx xx
Fax : +33/0 4 67 61 33 36

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Research

I’m working on phenological plasticity, which is one of the main mechanisms by which organisms adapt to climate change. We still know little about the limits of plasticity expression in new environments such as (i) a factor that goes outside its normal range of variation, e.g. unusually warm springs, or (ii) completely new environments such as urban environments. The goal of my PhD is to study these limits to the expression of phenological plasticity in response to novel environmental constraints. It is possible that local environmental constraints, such as the degree of habitat artificialization, limit phenological plasticity.

I’m studying the plasticity of breeding phenology in different blue tit populations and trying to identify covariates associated with its variability. For this, I use data from the Temporal Monitoring of Common Birds (https://crbpo.mnhn.fr/spip.php?article41) and develop a method to evaluate phenology based on the study of productivity (proportion of young individuals captured).

In a second step, other factors, potentially responsible for variations in plasticity within and between species, will be studied. For this, the methods developed previously will be applied to the EuroCES (https://euring.org/research/ces-europe) data, thus allowing the study of a large number of species, at a larger spatial scale (Europe). It will be interesting, once phylogenetic constraints are taken into account, to investigate the role of certain traits (such as diet and migratory behavior) that may affect phenology and plasticity.