Postdoctoral Fellow · University of Alberta

Santiago Ortega

I study how environmental change reshapes life histories, reproductive success, and biological variation — using comparative methods, Bayesian modelling, and evidence synthesis across species and populations.

Curriculum vitae GitHub ORCID Contact

About

Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta and member of the Collaboration for Open Science and Synthesis in Ecology and Evolution (COSSEE). My research focuses on how organisms respond to environmental variation — particularly how climate shifts alter reproductive timing, investment, and life-history strategies.

My work sits at the intersection of long-term field ecology, macroecology, and quantitative methods. I combine Bayesian hierarchical models, random regression, and location–scale approaches with systematic review and meta-analysis to tackle questions that require integrating data across species, populations, and time scales.

I am also part of the sTraitChange working group at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), and I am committed to open and reproducible scientific practice.

Santiago Ortega conducting nest checks among blue-footed boobies at Isla Isabel, Mexico

Nest checks at Isla Isabel, Mexico — the core field site of the blue-footed booby long-term study.

Position

Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Research group

COSSEE — Collaboration for Open Science and Synthesis in Ecology and Evolution

Research interests

Phenology · Climate-change ecology · Life-history evolution · Reproductive strategies · Bayesian hierarchical modelling · Meta-analysis · Evidence synthesis · Open science

Recognition

ABS & Elsevier Best Paper Award 2023

santiago.ortega@ualberta.ca

Profiles

GitHub · ORCID · Web of Science

Close-up portrait of a blue-footed booby at the Isla Isabel field site

Two blue-footed boobies in courtship display at Isla Isabel

Research themes

What I work on

My research connects broad questions about environmental change and biological variation to the quantitative methods needed to answer them rigorously and reproducibly.

Phenology, Climate Change & Reproductive Success

How shifts in seasonal conditions alter breeding timing, offspring survival, and reproductive investment. Work draws on long-term seabird datasets and global meta-analytic syntheses.

Life-History Evolution & Individual Plasticity

How organisms modulate reproductive strategies and parental investment in response to condition, experience, and environmental predictability. I use random regression and reaction-norm frameworks to study within-individual plasticity.

Bayesian Hierarchical & Distributional Modelling

I develop and apply Bayesian multilevel models — including location–scale (distributional) and random regression models — to ecological and evolutionary data, propagating uncertainty across hierarchical structures.

Evidence Synthesis & Meta-Science

Systematic reviews, systematic maps, and multilevel meta-analyses to synthesise ecological and evolutionary evidence. I contribute to effect-size development and simulation-based approaches for improving synthesis methodology.

Open & Reproducible Science

Documented workflows, preregistered protocols, and version-controlled analyses using R, Quarto, and GitHub. I contribute to collaborative open-science initiatives and support reproducible practice across ecology and evolution.

Featured work

Selected projects

A curated set of research projects spanning long-term field ecology, statistical methods development, and evidence synthesis.

Blue-footed booby parent with chick at Isla Isabel

Long-term field study

Life-history plasticity in the blue-footed booby

A multi-year programme investigating how individual condition, age, pair bonds, and environmental variability (including ENSO) shape reproductive strategies, parental care, offspring fitness, and survival in a long-lived seabird at Isla Isabel, Mexico. Work spans parental age effects, brood reduction, extra-pair paternity, and impacts of invasive species removal.

Long-term mark-recapture · behavioural observation · Bayesian models · survival analysis

2025 paper 2023 paper ★ 2022 paper 2021 paper

Statistical methods

Location–scale models in ecology and evolution

Developed and documented location–scale (distributional) regression models for ecologists and evolutionary biologists, providing a unified framework for modelling heteroscedasticity in continuous, count, and proportion data. Includes worked examples and R code using brms.

Bayesian distributional models · brms · R · simulation · real ecological datasets

Methods in Ecol & Evol 2025

Evidence synthesis

Phenological change and vertebrate population responses

A global meta-analysis showing how shifts in phenological timing mediate vertebrate population responses to temperature. Synthesises long-term datasets across taxa and regions to identify how well populations track changing seasonal conditions.

Multilevel meta-analysis · global datasets · temperature · vertebrates · phenology

Nature Communications 2026

Statistical methods

lnM: a new effect size for meta-analysis of magnitude

Proposes lnM, a novel effect size for measuring the magnitude of biological effects in meta-analysis, addressing key limitations in existing metrics and improving comparability across studies with different variances.

Effect size theory · meta-analysis · simulation · R · metafor

Under review — Ecology Letters

Publications & outputs

Selected publications

Peer-reviewed papers, preprints, and preregistered protocols. Full list on ORCID and Web of Science.

Published 2026

Changes in phenology mediate vertebrate population responses to temperature globally

Radchuk V, Jones CV, McLean N, Charmantier A, Teplitsky C, Alisauskas R, … Ortega S et al.

Nature Communications 17, 479

DOI

Published 2025

Location–scale models in ecology and evolution: heteroscedasticity in continuous, count and proportion data

Nakagawa S, Ortega S, Gazzea E, Lagisz M, Lenz A, Lundgren E, Mizuno A

Methods in Ecology and Evolution 17, 554–566

DOI

Published 2025

Long-term insights into who benefits from brood reduction

Drummond H, Rodriguez C, Ortega S

Behavioral Ecology 36, araf050

DOI

Published 2023 ★ ABS & Elsevier Best Paper Award

Extra-pair offspring of the blue-footed booby show no sign of higher fitness in the first 10 years of life

Ortega S, Ramirez-Loza JP, Rodriguez C, Perez-Morales D, Drummond H

Animal Behaviour 200, 105–114

DOI

Published 2022

Seasonal weather effects on offspring survival differ between reproductive stages in a long-lived neotropical seabird

Ortega S, Rodriguez C, Drummond H

Oecologia 199, 611–623

DOI

Under review

A new effect size for meta-analysis of magnitude: lnM

Nakagawa S, Mizuno A, Williams C, Lagisz M, O'Dea R, Noble D, Senior A, Lundgren E, Ortega S

Ecology Letters

Under review

A systematic map of systematic reviews and meta-analyses on anthropogenic noise impact on wildlife

Lenz A, Mizuno A, Lundgren E, Morrison K, Ortega S, Lagisz M, Nakagawa S

Preprint: EcoEvoRxiv

Preprint

Protocol 2026

Global patterns, blind spots, and transparency in phenology–climate change syntheses: a protocol for an umbrella evidence map

Ortega S et al.

OSF preregistration

OSF

Protocol 2026

Latent local marine conditions and reproductive performance in blue-footed boobies

Ortega S et al.

OSF preregistration

DOI

Protocol 2026

Phylogenetic and lifestyle differences in the relationship between body mass and litter size in mammals

Ortega S et al.

OSF preregistration

OSF

Protocol 2025

The effects of music exposure on rodent anxiety- and depression-like behaviours: a protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis

Ortega S et al.

OSF preregistration

DOI

Full publication list on ORCID

Networks & service

Affiliations & professional activity

COSSEE

Collaboration for Open Science and Synthesis in Ecology and Evolution — University of Alberta. Member since 2025.

sTraitChange

Working group on trait-based responses to environmental change — German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv). Member since 2018.

Peer review

Reviewer for Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications, Journal of Applied Ecology, Proceedings B, PLOS ONE, and others. 10 reviews across 9 publications (ORCID-recorded).

Training & internships

Research internships at the University of Edinburgh (random regression / reaction norms, 2022) and Centre d'Estudis Avançats de Blanes, Spain (multi-state modelling, 2017).

Collaboration

Open to collaboration

I welcome collaborations involving long-term ecological datasets, Bayesian hierarchical modelling, phylogenetic or comparative methods, evidence synthesis, or reproducible research workflows. I am particularly interested in projects connecting environmental change to life-history responses, phenology, and reproductive success — across taxa and scales.

If you are organising a symposium, workshop, or collaborative grant in any of the areas below, I am happy to hear from you.

Topics and methods

Bayesian hierarchical models Location–scale models Random regression Meta-analysis Systematic reviews & maps Phenology Climate-change ecology Life-history evolution Reproductive success Long-term field data Open & reproducible science

santiago.ortega@ualberta.ca

Send an email

Institution

University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

GitHub

github.com/Santiago-0rtega

ORCID & Web of Science

0000-0002-3518-276X · K-2568-2019

Curriculum vitae

Download CV (PDF)