Daniel Sol

I currently hold a Research Professor position from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) at the Ecological and Forestry Applications Research Centre (CREAF), and an adjunct professor position at the University Autonomous of Barcelona. My international professional trajectory includes a three-years postdoc at McGill University (Canada), as well as research conducted in Australia and Barbados. My laboratory is integrated within the SGR-Cat 2021 research consortium, which includes 16 labs working in a variety of topics from theoretical and molecular ecology to GIS and environmental policy analysis. My current network of international collaborators include researchers from Australia, Brasil, Chile, Canada, France, Czech Republic and United Kingdom. The overarching goal of my research is to understand how animals cope with environmental change, and how their responses both influence and are influenced by their ecology and evolution. I'm particularly interested in rapid, human-induced alterations such as urbanisation, as well as changes arising from range expansions or the exploitation of new ecological opportunities. Together with my students, postdoctoral researchers and collaborators, we focus on five main questions: 1) Why are some species able to successfully colonise novel environments to which they have had little opportunity to adapt? 2) To what extent, and through which mechanisms, does behavioural plasticity help to reduce maladaptation in these situations? 3) Is behavioural plasticity part of a broader life-history strategy for coping with environmental change? 4) Does this strategy facilitate niche expansion and more rapid evolutionary diversification? and 5) How does variation in tolerance to change affect the diversity and stability of communities exposed to environmental alterations? To address these questions, we integrate behavioural, morphological, ecological and phylogenetic perspectives, using experimental, comparative, modelling and individual-based approaches.