Christiaan Both (born 12 December 1969) is a Dutch Associate professor of

ecology Ecology () is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their Natural environment, environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community (ecology), community, ecosystem, and biosphere lev ...

at the

University of Groningen The University of Groningen (abbreviated as UG; , abbreviated as RUG) is a Public university#Continental Europe, public research university of more than 30,000 students in the city of Groningen (city), Groningen, Netherlands. Founded in 1614, th ...

Early life

Christiaan Both was born in the Netherlands in 1969. From 1988 to 1993 he studied in various universities including

Groningen Groningen ( , ; ; or ) is the capital city and main municipality of Groningen (province), Groningen province in the Netherlands. Dubbed the "capital of the north", Groningen is the largest place as well as the economic and cultural centre of ...

Oxford Oxford () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and non-metropolitan district in Oxfordshire, England, of which it is the county town. The city is home to the University of Oxford, the List of oldest universities in continuou ...

and

Wageningen Wageningen () is a Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality and a historic city in the central Netherlands, in the province of Gelderland. It is famous for Wageningen University, which specialises in life sciences. The municipality had a ...

. In 1998 he graduated with a Ph.D. from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and since that time worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Groningen, Bangor universities as well as

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of C ...

. In 2004 he joined Animal Ecology Group, a division of Groningen and three years later became

Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research The Dutch Research Council (NWO, Dutch: Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) is the national research council of the Netherlands. NWO funds thousands of top researchers at universities and institutes and steers the course o ...

's fellow.

Career

Christiaan Both studied density-dependent reproduction during his PhD, where he aimed to understand why birds lay smaller clutches when competition increased. This work was both using long-term data from hole-breeding passerines, and also experimental. It showed that great tit clutch size is causally affected by local density, and that the density dependent response could be explained by an optimal response of individuals to the level of competition for food during the nestling phase. From 1998 Christiaan Both, Niels Dingemanse, Piet Drent and Joost Tinbergen have studied

great tit The great tit (''Parus major'') is a small passerine bird in the tit family Paridae. It is a widespread and common species throughout Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and east across the Palearctic to the Amur River, south to parts of No ...

s' exploration and showed that this variation in personality traits is heritable. They were interested in how such variation with a heritable component could be maintained over evolutionary time, and therefore studied fitness consequences for three years in a wild population of great tits. The selection fluctuated between years, between the sexes and pair-combinations of personality were found to be important Since 2001 Christiaan mostly worked on the effects of climate change on trophic interactions, with an emphasis on changes phenology. Together with Marcel Visser he showed that climate change resulted in an insufficient response in timing of migration and egg-laying in the long-distance migratory pied flycatcher, and that local populations declined as a result of increased asynchrony between breeding time and the date of the local food peak. He is mostly interested in how different organisms can respond with different mechanisms and speeds to the high rates of current climate change, and the consequences this has for trophic interactions.

References

External links

* *Both's University of Groninge
webpage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Both, Christiaan 1969 births Living people Dutch ecologists Alumni of the University of Oxford University of Groningen alumni Academic staff of the University of Groningen