Last december Carlos Merino Luca started his PhD on the ecology and conservation of sandgrouse, funded by the FPU program of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. He will be looking at large-scale changes in the distribution and abundance of sandgrouse in Spain in the last 20 years due to land transformation. At local scale, he will focus on assessing changes in habitat suitabilty in Doñana National Park based on historical and present occurrence data, and he will study the movement strategies of these species under dynamic environmental conditions (flooding and changes in resource availability). He will work using the National Breeding survey data for the pin-tailed and the black-bellied sandgrouse (2005 and 2019), and the data generated in the GANGAMOVE project under the supervision of François Mougeot and me. While he is affiliated with IREC-CSIC, he will be working during extended periods at EBD-CSIC, and will spend some time doing fieldwork at Doñana NP. Welcome, Carlos!
