Dr James Cant

Dr James Cant (he/him)

Post-doctoral Research Fellow

[email protected]

I am a quantitative marine ecologist interested in exploring the drivers of population performance and resilience. I am fascinated by how the mathematical properties of individual organisms can be used to determine the ability for their populations to resist and recover from disturbances and enjoy using ecological models to predict community composition under future climate scenarios. I completed my PhD at the University of Leeds, UK, during which I evaluated variation between the dynamics of subtropical and tropical coral populations, and what this can tell us about the ability for coral communities to endure increasingly variable climates. As part of this research, I was lucky enough to be involved in the development of ongoing demographic reef surveys in both Australia and Japan. Following my PhD, I moved to the University of Southern Denmark to design state-of-the-art population models combining biodemographic and hydrodynamic drifting data to forecast the movement and aggregation of Jellyfish populations around Northern Europe. At the Centre for Biological Diversity my current research focuses on exploring the links between habitat structure and biodiversity, and thus aims to quantify mechanisms through which complexity mediates community composition.