Filippa Erixon

Research interests

I am an ecologist with broad interests in animal behavior, population and community ecology, and conservation biology. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between among-individual variation in behavior and movement, specifically dispersal, and its potential impacts on large-scale population and community dynamics. Additionally, I have a keen interest in host-pathogen interactions, specifically how personality interplays with parasite infection.

My PhD topic is “Intraspecific trait variation in movement behavior as mechanism for species coexistence” and is integrated in the BioMove Research Training Group. In this project, I focus on individual differences in movement-related behavior (boldness, exploration, activity) and assess its consequences for within and between-species interactions. To achieve this, I will employ a combination of experimental manipulations of rodent movement options within an agricultural landscape and individual trait variation in a rodent meta-community, in conjunction with spatially explicit individual-based modeling. The goal is to test how dynamic changes in landscape structure modulate the impact of consistent individual differences in movement-related behavior on species coviability.