People

I coordinate the Finnish common bird monitoring schemes and lead my research group the Helsinki Lab of Ornithology in the Finnish Museum of Natural History. I wrote my first bird observations in year 1987. I started my biology studies in 1999 and finished my MSc thesis about population dynamics and diet of the Great Cormorant in 2003. In my PhD thesis (2009), I studied impact of climate and food availability on timing of breeding and breeding success of eight bird species. I have been working in the Finnish Museum of Natural History since November 2009. I'm also a board member of the European Bird Census Council and a member of the Finnish Nature Panel (Luontopaneeli in Finnish). I am also an active ringer and observer at the Hanko Bird Observatory (website in Finnish).

I am a grant-funded researcher at Helsinki Lab of Ornithology HelLO, where I have been working as a postdoc since 2020. My research focuses on understanding avian responses to climate and land-use changes in relation to habitat loss and fragmentation at various spatial scales. I graduated in 2018 from the University of Bern (Switzerland) where I researched effects of vineyard management and landscape structure on Woodlarks and their arthropod prey. Afterwards I worked at the Swiss Ornithological Institute as scientific collaborator in a project on increasing vineyard biodiversity in southern Switzerland. I am a board member of the Society for Conservation Biology Europe Section since 2021 and chair of the Policy Committee since 2022.

I started my PhD thesis at the beginning of 2022. My project aims at understanding altitudinal shifts in avian communities under climate change across European mountains and the implications for the conservation. The project takes a macroecological approach to understand the broad impacts of climate change on species communities. My thesis is supervised by Aleksi Lehikoinen, Emma Marjakangas and  Andrea Santangeli and is funded by the Kone Foundation. During my free time, I like to knit sew and walk in the nature.

In my PhD project I have used citizen science to create information on the aesthetic value of all the bird species to humans. I use this new data set to understand the role of the aesthetics of birds in different biodiversity conservation issues such as wildlife trade. The work is supervised by Aleksi Lehikoinen and Andrea Santangeli and is funded by the Kone Foundation. I have a background in ecology, geography, and pedagogics. I’m in general interested in biodiversity conservation and especially in human interactions with their environment and other species. In addition to research, I work in the field of education.

Birds, boxplots and boxing! My PhD focuses on the climate-driven changes in protected areas by examining the temperature preferences of bird communities and populations. By studying this topic, I aim to clarify the effectiveness of protected areas in a changing world and what actions should be taken to preserve birds with boreal ranges. My thesis is supervised by Aleksi Lehikoinen and Emma-Liina Marjakangas and funded by National Research Council Finland and The Emil Aaltonen Foundation. In my spare time, I move from studying birds and creating boxplots to birdwatching or boxing.

I am investigating how farmland practices affect bird and butterfly biodiversity.

I investigate how population dynamics of birds are affected by demographics, survival and productivity.

I am investigating which factors related to climate change and land use are affecting breeding populations of endangered bird species and also the risk of becoming endangered. I will also try to predict which currently general species might become endangered in the future and figure out with what measures the protection of these species could be enhanced. The thesis is supervised by Jari Valkama, Markus Piha and Aleksi Lehikoinen. I obtained her MSc in 2014 in the University of Helsinki. I did my Master’s thesis in Kenya, studying the co-operative breeding behavior of Cabanis’s greenbul. After graduation I acquired additional training in GIS and spent 4 months at the FMNH working with Jari Valkama on various GIS tasks. When not at the office I can be found outside either running, mountain biking, skiing or kayaking. 

My PhD thesis is about how climate change may affect species interactions and I use bats as a study taxon.

I am a macroecologist broadly interested in different research topics on macro-spatial ecological dynamics. I joined HelLO from 2020 and have been working on climate-driven dynamics of wildlife and zoonotic diseases in European birds and bats; pan-European conservation prioritization for birds under global change; waterbird diversity and abundance trends with wetland restoration practices in Finland. Before joining HelLO, I worked on connectivity of global bird migration networks and defended my PhD thesis entitled ‘Unravelling Networks: Causes and Consequences of Decreasing Connectivity in Bird Migration Pathways’ at Wageningen University & Research (the Netherlands).