Kate Searle

For two decades my research has focused on the effects of environmental change on wildlife behaviour, population dynamics and distributions. By combining contemporary ecological techniques with an understanding of resource-consumer dynamics in heterogeneous environments, I aim to gain mechanistic, process-driven understanding of ecological systems through both advanced statistical modelling and applied, management-orientated experiments. I am particularly interested in understanding how individual behaviour of wildlife scales up to affect population and ecosystem level consequences in rapidly changing, complex environments. For the last five years, I have worked on the Isle of May long-term study of seabird ecology in the north-eastern UK. Here, my research aims to understand how different aspects of environmental change affect population processes in breeding seabirds. In MERP I am working to understand how spatio-temporal variation in weather and resources affect population processes in breeding seabirds, and to map predation pressure from breeding seabirds in UK waters.