What is new this year? In reverse chronological order, some milestones:

• Coralie Picoche brillantly defended her PhD thesis on the fine-scale modelling of phytoplankton communities on September 14. Congratulations Coralie! We are very grateful to the jury members (Frederik de Laender, Jon Pitchford, Christèle Etchegaray, Bart Haegeman, Bedr’Eddine Ainseba) for their thorough reading and thoughtful remarks. All articles from Coralie’s PhD are now out in some form. The first one was published in J Theor Biol earlier this year and the second at ReScience. Third manuscript on the local spatial structure of phytoplankton communities and its implication for coexistence, in collaboration with Bill Young, at preprint stage on arXiv. It uses an individual-based model of spatial community dynamics (incl. diffusion) coupled with a model of turbulent advection of the fluid. Quite amazingly, we get closed-form solutions for indicators of spatial structure and neighborhood species composition, so simulations of the model can be compared to analytical predictions. Turns out that small phytoplankton probably lives in largely single-species neighborhoods (reducing interspecies competition) but large phytoplankton not so much.

• Guillaume Doyen, intern with us this summer reproduced an article in Nature by Huisman and Weissing on phytoplankton coexistence through chaotic population oscillations. We found that the findings could be replicated, although only for the parameter values supplied (not robust to perturbations of these parameters). This led to another preprint submitted to ReScience, congrats Guillaume for performing all the simulations and writing with us your first article.

• Tewann Beauchard passed his MSc at Univ Pau (well-done Tewann!). He worked with Frédéric and Matthieu on integrated population modelling (using counts, capture-recapture, and fecundity data to infer demographic parameters). He looked into what happens when we allow adults and juveniles to be counted separately, and found that it may allow inferences even when one of the above data sources is missing.

• Matthieu & Frédéric have been looking some more into integrated models for assessing predator-prey interactions. And identifiability more generally. Stay tuned for updates.

• In June, Frédéric presented at the International Statistical Ecology Conference (this year in South Africa, we attended remotely) an ongoing effort to create a new, diamond open access journal of statistical ecology. This means no article processing charges, free for authors as well as readers, and funded by institutions. We keep working on that front with folks from the French Statistical Ecology group and hopefully soon with colleagues from various parts of the world.

• From June 2022 as well, in northern Norway: Eivind Kleiven successfully defended his PhD at the University of Tromsø on small mammal population dynamics studied through camera traps (and statistical models). Congrats Eivind! More info on Eivind’s thesis here.