GELIFES Seminars - Thomas Lameris

Thomas Lameris (GELIFES)

Flexible waterbird migrations

With rapid climate warming affecting our planet, many biologists are studying the impact of the resulting environmental changes on animals and their potential role in ongoing biodiversity loss. For many migratory bird species, a key hypothesis is that due to the inflexibility in the timing of migration and reproduction, the moment of chick growth is becoming mismatched with earlier seasonal food peaks under climate warming, resulting in reduced chick survival and population growth. Whether such mismatches are and will become important as factors driving population change depends on (i) other climate-related environmental changes impacting reproductive success and (ii) the flexibility of waterbirds to adjust the timing of reproduction and migration. In this presentation, we will follow barnacle geese and red knots during their annual cycle, taking a backward approach – starting with the potential impacts of mistiming and mismatches on the Arctic breeding grounds, followed by changes in phenology along their migration routes, all the way back to the start of migration.

Biosketch:
Thomas Lameris is a migration ecologist and is employed as a tenure-track researcher at GELIFES since February 2025. He studies Arctic migratory waterfowl and shorebirds, following these birds from wintering grounds around the Wadden Sea to breeding sites in the Eurasian Arctic. His main interest is the behavioural flexibility of birds to adjust to a warming and changing environment. He combines old-school observational studies, tracking technologies and experiments to test the limits of behavioural flexibility in migratory birds.a