This week, my friend and research collaborator Ricardo Martínez-García, a young investigator group leader working in the dynamics of complex living systems at the German Centre for Advanced Systems Understanding in Görlitz, is hosting me a CASUS to discuss science and give a seminar about our research in the lab.

Ricardo and I have been collaborating for a while on trying to develop a better understanding of the role of local scale processes such as territoriality in animals in the population dynamics of species. We use maths to come up with modelling approaches to tackle these problems.

This week we have also been joined by Cinzia Soresina, a bright mathematician from the University of Trento in Italy, to incorporate an approach grounded on cross-diffusion in networks that she has recently developed, into our framework of territorial behaviour.

This work will form the basis for a scientific article we hope to publish sometime next year and complements current work I am developing to better understand the spatial dynamics of rock pipits (Anthus petrosus).

Aside from the great research we are developing together, I had the chance to present our recent work at the lab in a seminar entitled Understanding the structure of complex communities across scales: from microbes to vertebrates, where I shared our research on microbe-host symbioses, recently published in Trends in Microbiology, as well as the research currently being developed by Lucie on the effects of protected areas on safeguarding food webs and our theoretical appraoches to disturbance spread and habitat recovery.

During this visit, we are lying the foundations for future collaborations and project proposals.

After work, we are enjoying the nice weather around Görlitz, a very beautiful town to the east of Germany, right next on the border with Poland. We have had the chance to explore the outdoors, the city, as well as the natural history museum.

Thanks Ricardo for being an excellent host and allow me to share my research at CASUS!