Today, we are pleased to welcome the latest new member of the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. Chris Sutherland joins us from the University of Massachusetts, USA and you can find out a little more about him below.

Chris Sutherland

“I’m an applied ecologist with a focus on spatial population ecology. I am particularly interested in understanding how spatial processes such as movement, dispersal and connectivity, influence the dynamics of spatially structured populations. Most of my research involves the development and application of spatially realistic hierarchical models for observations of individuals, populations and metapopulations.”

Chris has had a couple of articles published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution in recent years. In his 2015 article ‘Modelling non-Euclidean movement and landscape connectivity in highly structured ecological networks‘ Chris and his co-authors (Angela K. Fuller and J. Andrew Royle) evaluated the consequences of not accounting for movement heterogeneity when estimating abundance in highly structured landscapes, and demonstrated the value of this approach for estimating biologically realistic space-use patterns and landscape connectivity.

‘A multiregion community model for inference about geographic variation in species richness‘ by Chris, Mattia Brambilla, Paolo Pedrini and Simone Tenan was published in the journal in 2016. This paper reported on a new approach that provided a mechanism for testing hypotheses about why and how species richness varies across space.

Last year, Chris was also involved in ‘Quantifying spatial variation in the size and structure of ecologically stratified communities‘, which was published in the August issue of Methods. In this article, the authors provided a novel hierarchical multi-region community model for direct modelling of trait-based patterns of species richness along environmental gradients by splitting communities into ecologically relevant strata.

Chris currently has a number of ongoing projects including a long term (20 year) metapopulation study on water voles in North West Scotland with the objectives of better understanding the spatial drivers of colonisation-extinction dynamics and persistence of spatially structured populations. He is also working on monitoring and density estimation of a recovering population of American marten using photographic capture-recapture using a novel camera trapping design.

We are thrilled to welcome Chris as a new Associate Editor and we look forward to working with him on the journal.