My first postdoc has involved using long-term data to better understand population dynamics of migratory shorebirds. Shorebirds face a myriad of threats, including habitat degradation along their migratory route and climate change impacting their breeding and non-breeding grounds.

Recently, population declines have been stabilizing. To figure out why this is, I'm working as part of a collaborative team investigating their population dynamics and conservation management actions that have been undertaken. My part of this project is to understand how their breeding success, expressed as juvenile proportions, fluctuates through time and with varying climate. 

As part of this project, one key assumption underlying subsequent analyses is that birds in a given location adequately represent the local population year after year (i.e. changes in local abundance are not overwhelmingly driven by movements between sites). To address this, I was part of a project that investigated how faithful shorebird species are to their Australian non-breeding sites, finding exceptionally high site-fidelity in most species.