Professor Dylan Childs

I am a quantitative ecologist whose research seeks to understand how environmental, ecological, and demographic processes interact to shape population dynamics, life-history evolution, and the resilience of natural systems. My work integrates long-term ecological datasets with statistical and mechanistic models, using approaches such as integral projection models and trait-based analyses to uncover how variation in individual traits and vital rates emerges and how it influences population-level patterns.

I am particularly interested in how organisms respond to climate and land-use change, how environmental variability drives ecological dynamics, and how these forces determine long-term viability. Much of my research involves developing new demographic theory and methodological tools for modelling structured populations, as well as applying these tools across a wide range of taxa and ecological contexts. By combining rigorous quantitative approaches with detailed empirical data, my work aims to reveal the processes that generate resilience or vulnerability in populations and to build models that can robustly predict ecological trajectories under changing environmental conditions.