Welcome to the Conservation Ecology Research Group! We are a group of researchers based at Durham University, in Durham, United Kingdom. Our work ranges from the evolutionary ecology of individual behaviour to the drivers of global biogeographic patterns, usually with a strong applied focus. 
​Recent News
  • Together with colleagues at the Institute of Zoology in London, and Brazil's federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Phil and Steve have a new paper out in Ecology Letters, looking at the limits to population density in birds and mammals. The paper is here. Read about the motivation for this work, as well as some of the findings in this blog post.
 
  • Phil has a "Dispatches" piece out in Current Biology, profiling the importance of a new paper that links diet and luck to behaviour and population dynamics. The paper is here. Read about the link between this and previous research on the determinants of carnivore population density in this blog post.
​
  • Christine and Phil have a new paper out in Conservation Letters investigating the drivers of threatened species richness patterns. The open access paper is from a collaboration with Curt Flather from the USDA Forest Service. Read about it in our blog post here. 
 
  • Congratulations to Pen and Claire for both recently successfully defending their PhD theses! 
 
  • Pen has a new paper out in Natural Resource Modeling. The paper investigates the effects of disturbance and fecundity-tolerance strategies on community composition and uses macrofaunal communities at deep‐sea hydrothermal vents as a case study. Find out more here.
 
  • Courtney has a new paper out in Animal Biotelemetry. The open-access paper titled "Assessing the utility and limitations of accelerometers and machine learning approaches in classifying behaviour during lactation in a phocid seal" can be found here. Courtney has also written a blog about the paper which can be found here.
​    
  • Read about a new paper on climate change and competition between Apennine chamois and red deer, recently published in Current Zoology by Francesco Ferretti, who visited the CEG in 2017 on an Institute of Advanced Studies Senior Fellowship. Our blog about the paper is here.
 
  • Read about the new paper from MammalWeb, recently published in Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation. Our blog about the paper is here.
 
See additional group news here or follow us on Twitter @CEGDurham