NATHALIE PETTORELLI

Academic training and work experience : Nathalie has obtained her Ph.D. in ecology in October 2002 at the University Claude Bernard Lyon 1 in France, under the supervision of Jean-Michel Gaillard. Her Ph.D. project aimed at describing and quantifying the impact of the identified spatial structure in the habitat quality of a fenced roe deer population in France (the Chizé reserve) on roe deer performance and dynamics. This interdisciplinary Ph.D. (mixing ecology of nutrition, botanics, population dynamics, management issues, and statistics) has been performed in collaboration with the CNRS (Lyon and Chizé), the Office National des forêts, the Cemagref and the Office National de la Chasse.

Her two post-doctoral projects at the CEES (Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, at the University of Oslo in Norway), first funded by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Lavoisier Fellowship) and then by Europe (Marie Curie Fellowship), were articulated around the use of satellite-based indices (NDVI) in population dynamics of large herbivores. More precisely, the aim was to quantify, for different species, the relationships between vegetation dynamics and individual performance, at different spatial and temporal scales. This work has been performed in collaboration with the University of Oslo (Atle Mysterud, Nils Chr. Stenseth), the University of Tromsø (Nigel Yoccoz), the University of Svalbard (Rolf Langvatn), the University of Lyon (Jean-Michel Gaillard), and the University of Ås (Øystein Holand and Robert Weladji). Nathalie has joined the Chaire in september 2005. She is now a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Zoology, London, United-Kingdom.

Research interests : Nathalie's research interests include population ecology and wildlife conservation and management. During the last years, she has principally worked on decomposing individual variability and understanding the influence of environmental conditions on population dynamics of large ungulates, using biological models such as reindeer, roe deer and red deer. Her major challenge nowadays is to quantitatively link, at different spatial scales and in contrasted ecosystems, climatic variability, vegetation dynamics and large herbivores' performance. By doing so, she hopes to actively contribute in helping forecasting possible effects of environmental variations such as climate changes on herbivores population dynamics. To do so, she can count on collaborators in Canada, Norway and France.

Other link : Institute of Zoology