The research in our lab focuses on the thermal ecology, movement ecology and population dynamics of freshwater fishes. These seemingly disparate fields of research are actually tightly linked.

Most fishes cannot physiologically regulate their body temperature and, as a result, their temperature is mainly determined by that of the surrounding water. Therefore, water temperature influences all aspects of a fish’s life (e.g. growth, reproduction, survival) and in fact it has long been considered “the master environmental factor” for fish. Fish readily respond to daily and seasonal changes in water temperature and, if needed and possible, they will move to nearby or distant habitats in search of suitable thermal conditions. Changes in fish growth, reproduction, survival and spatial location/distribution brought about by variation in water temperature (and the interaction of temperature with other factors!) will largely determine the abundance of fish populations over time and space (i.e. the dynamics of their populations).

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Our research methods combine biotelemetry (e.g. radio, acoustic) and biologging (e.g. accelerometers) technologies to collect data from wild, free-ranging fish with advanced statistical and mathematical approaches (e.g. mark-recapture, hierarchical, hidden Markov, matrix projection models) to analyse data and infer ecological processes.