Today, member of the Species360 Conservation Science Alliance, Dr. Johanna Staerk successfully defended her PhD thesis “From Data to Decision – Filling Demographic Knowledge Gaps for the Conservation of threatened species” at the Max Planck Odense Centre of the Biodemography of Aging, University of Southern Denmark (SDU).

In her thesis, Johanna investigated how to make better decisions in support of integrated conservation planning of threatened species in the European Union, how to fill demographic knowledge gaps using zoo data and how to improve estimates of generation time for IUCN Red List assessments. 

Her thesis was supervised by Species360 Director of Science, Prof. Dalia Conde and Prof. Fernando Colchero from the Department of Mathematics and Computer sciences at SDU and assessed by committee members Prof. Yvonne Buckley (Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin), Prof. Manfred Niekisch (Zoological Garden Frankfurt) and Assoc. Prof. Rune Lindahl-Jacobsen (University of Southern Denmark).

Photo: From left to right: Prof. Yvonne Buckley (Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin), Prof. Dalia Conde (Species360, SDU), Prof. Fernando Colchero (SDU), Dr. Johanna Staerk (Species360, SDU), Prof. Manfred Niekisch (Zoologischer Garten Frankfurt)