Dr Philipp Boersch‑Supan

Quantitative Ecologist


I try to understand the physical and biological processes that shape the distribution, abundance, and movements of animals, and their life-history strategies. I predominantly address these questions primarily by studying birds, and by using a combination of field observations and computational/theoretical approaches. I love to dig into biological data and am broadly interested in making and improving quantitative tools for ecological research and to this end I am working on a number of open source software projects.

I am based at the British Trust for Ornithology where I oversee a programme of statistical research, covering topics such as the design of biodiversity surveys, analyses of large-scale and long-term datasets and the evaluation of monitoring technology, and lead a team of statisticians and quantitative ecologists who champion ecologically-informed robust data analysis.

In my previous work I have studied a variety of biological systems including the midwater ecology around seamounts and atolls, resource allocation strategies and migration phenology in penguins and albatrosses and the ecology of human and non-human pathogens and disease vectors.

Recent News and Blog posts

01 Jun 2021: Blog post - A feather at a time
09 Mar 2021: New paper - Interventions can shift the thermal optimum of parasitic disease transmission
28 Feb 2021: New paper - Waders of the UK's open coast
21 Apr 2020: Blog post - Lockdown effects on citizen science bird reporting rates
19 Feb 2020: Blog post - BirdTrack - a Swiss army knife in BTO’s toolkit