Welcome

This website is undergoing an overhaul! Please bear with me as I revamp the content to reflect my new position and latest research interests.

I am a broadly-trained ecologist with interests in population dynamics, animal behaviour, conservation, and open science practices. In Fall 2022, I started a tenure-track research position in the Department of Animal Ecology at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) in Wageningen. My work focuses on understanding how animals respond to environmental variation, with a particular eye to the consequences of seasonality at different scales, from individual phenotypes to population demography and beyond. To address these and related questions, I’ll be making use and contributing to the ongoing collection of the Institute’s long-term ecological studies of hole-breeding passerines at four site around the Netherlands, with data collection dating back to 1955. These studies represent some of the longest time series of their kind and offer exciting opportunities to understand how birds have and continue to respond to the dramatic, human-induced environmental changes of the last century. (See my NIOO profile here.)

I completed my Ph.D. with Dr. Ryan Norris at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. My thesis research looked at how the timing of environmental stressors influences the patterns, mechanisms, and detectability of population declines. During my M.Sc. at the University of Amsterdam, I investigated differential long-distance migration in lesser black-backed gulls and behavioural plasticity in red knots. Prior to joining NIOO-KNAW, I worked as a postdoctoral teaching and research fellow with the CIEE Living Data Project based at McGill University and Université de Montréal.

© Joseph B. Burant 2022. All rights reserved.