The Per Brinck Oikos Award 2010

The Per Brinck Oikos Award 2010 has been awarded to Professor Hanna Kokko, University of Helsinki, Finland.

Professor Hanna Kokko will give her 'Per Brinck Oikos Award Lecture' during The Swedish Oikos Society meeting in Visby, Sweden, Feb 2010.

Professor Kokko describes her research interest:

In our team that is called either LEED or Kokkonuts (depending on context), we devote our time to the study of ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Some of us are empirically oriented, some more theoretically, but all of us like to study interactions between individual behaviour, life-history theory and population dynamics. Some of us are interested in problems of spatial behaviour: conflicts that underlie social behaviour and space use strategies, such as dispersal, species invasion, and competition for territories.

Another theme is the study of sexual selection and sex roles:how do reproductive strategies of males and females depend on (but also have an influence on) population-wide characteristics of the species.

Since all of us like to think about the feedback between evolution and population dynamics, much of our work addresses the consequences of individual behaviour on conservation and management problems: for example, how competition for best breeding sites, or variation in male and female mate-searching ability, influence population responses to habitat loss or changing climates. Finally, some of our work addresses the theory of sustainable exploitation of renewable resources. We're not terribly picky when it comes to study species. There's work on fish, birds, insects, frogs...

Source: Wiley-Blackwell