Research interest: I study movement ecology of birds, and in particular, how birds have adapted to perform long migrations and navigate across space. I currently study the migration phenotype of young birds, and especially the variation and functional characteristics of the endogenous migration program guiding solo-migrating birds on their first migration by behavioural experiments in the lab and by individual tracking. I also have a keen interest in swifts and their mobile lifestyle. In this project, I study by continental-wide tracking the migration strategies, route choices and winter movements in common swifts (Apus apus) from different parts of the European and Asian breeding range.

Research interest: Research of Jiří Reif focuses on understanding drivers of bird populations to inform conservation policy. It covers a broad range of topics including climate change impacts, invasion biology, effects of land use changes, as well as consequences of interspecific competition. Jiří Reif mostly works with common bird monitoring and atlas data collected by volunteers, but he also contributes as a fieldworker to projects of his wife investing bird speciation. He is an associate professor of conservation biology at Charles University in Prague, and he is involved in coordination of breeding bird monitoring schemes in Czechia. He serves as a subject editor in ecological journal Oikos.

Research interest: My research focuses on wild populations of long-lived birds and their responses to changes in marine and terrestrial ecosystems, including: responses to historic and recent changes in climate and land use; foraging and migration movements and dietary ecology; regulation of trade-offs in response to variable environmental; conditions: parasitology, field endocrinology and immunology. While small petrels are my main focus, I am now also involved in research on a variety of species from different habitats.

Research interest: I combine ecological and evolutionary hypotheses to study how environmental spatial and temporal variation influences patterns of biological diversity. Currently I focus on evaluating the drivers of spatial and temporal variation in hummingbird plant interactions across elevation gradients using intensive field based sampling. At a regional scale, I integrate existing data sources such as museum informatics, remote-sensing data, and phylogenetic hypotheses in order to explore potential mechanisms influencing patterns of species’ distributions.

My principal research focus is on the evolutionary ecology of behavioral traits. Behaviors are particularly interesting, because individuals can flexibly vary them according to the prevailing environmental situation. In my field studies (targeting a European passerine species), I investigate the fitness consequences of the within-individual plasticity of behaviors, while also aim at understanding the long-term dynamics of different variance components of traits within the population. At the interspecific level, I perform phylogenetic comparative studies to understand the evolutionary constraints that shape the interplay between behavioral flexibility and consistency in birds.