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Lab members
I'm a Research Professor from the National Spanish Research council (CSIC) at CREAF (Centre for Ecological Research and Applied Forestries). PhD at the Universitat de Barcelona (2000). Postdoc at McGill University (Québec, Canada) in Louis Lefebvre lab (2001-2003).
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Throughout my career, I've been motivated about animal behaviour, on understanding how they interact with the environment and its consequences across social scales. I have acquired interest in the required skills for research in bird and carnivorous mammal ecology. I did my Master’s thesis at the Department of Territory and Sustainability, Fauna and Flora Service of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia, where I studied the integration of a brown bear in the Central Pyrenees (Iberian Peninsula, NE) after a translocation using its seasonal, monthly and annual home ranges and activity patterns. I'm currently doing my PhD, where I aim to assess how animal behaviour influences population dynamics, focusing my work on the Western Jackdaw (Corvus monedula). For my research, I'm using new technologies to develop automated monitoring systems for the experimental setups.
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Laura Noguer (PhD candidate, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2022-) earned her bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science from the same university in 2018. Her undergraduate studies focused on fluvial ecology and population genetics. Subsequently, during her master’s degree in Terrestrial Ecology in 2021, her interests shifted towards behavioural ecology. Investigating decision-making and behavioural plasticity in animals' response to environmental changes, she utilized jackdaws as a model system. In September 2022, she started her doctoral thesis at CREAF with an FPI grant, supervised by Daniel Sol. Her thesis explores how jackdaws utilize and exchange information in their habitat selection process.
Lab members photos
​Alessandra Bateman (PhD candidate, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2022-) completed her bachelor’s degree in Biology at the same university in 2018. She pursued her master’s degree at Københavns Universitet (Denmark), focusing on sexual selection in herbivores. In September 2022, she embarked on her doctoral journey at CREAF with a Severo-Ochoa FPI grant, under the joint supervision of Daniel Sol and Alex Taylor (UAB). Her research focuses on unravelling the cognitive foundations of innovative decision-making, utilizing jackdaws as a model species. Her doctoral research is strongly related with the objectives of the project, and she will actively participate in both SO2.1 and SO2.2.
Information for prospective students
Graduate Students
I will usually consider qualified PhD students to join the Sol lab. Email (d.sol@creaf.uab.cat) or call me ((34) 93 581 46 78) if you're interested. I am especially interested in students with interests in statistics and animal ecology.

Postdoctoral Researchers
I don't currently have funding for new postdocs but would consider someone who wants to discuss an idea to apply for funding.
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Former MSc, she did her PhD thesis at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) about brain evolution and she is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of St Andrews (UK).
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Former Postdoc in the lab, he is now a consolidated researcher at EBD-CSIC (Doñana Biological Station), Seville, funded by a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship. He is broadly interested in understanding how global change drivers impact community structure and composition, and how those impacts translate to the ecosystem functioning. His work mostly focuses on plant-pollinator communities, which show complex responses to land use change, climate warming or biological invasions, and encapsulate a critical ecosystem function, pollination. Nacho has been co-PI in two projects of the lab.
Miquel Vall-Llosera
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Former PhD student in the lab, he did a postdoc with Phill Cassey at the University of Adelaide (Australia) and currently holds a position as associate editor of PLoS-One. His main interests are biological invasions and conservation biology.
Former Postdoctoral fellow in the lab, he did his PhD at Bath University and has now a position in the Mexican CONACYT. His interests are broad, including sexual selection, quantitative biology and infectious diseases.
Former PhD student in the lab, he is currently a researcher in CIRENYS (Chile) and associate researcher at the Universidad Católica de Chile. His interests aim to understand the causes and consequences, ecological and evolutionary, of the response of organisms to environmental changes, with special emphasis on those environmental disturbances of anthropic origin. He has been part of a long-term collaboration on the impact of urbanization on birds.
Former PhD student in the lab, he moved to Boston as postdoc in Losos lab at Harvard and has recently returned at CREAF as associate researcher. He has broad interests in evolutionary biology, including comparative phylogenetics, behavioral ecology and global change biology.
Former MSc student in the lab, she did her PhD at Max-Planck Institute and is currently a Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at the Centre of Evolutionary and Functional Ecology in France. She is mainly interested in the ecology and evolution of behaviour.
Former Postdoctoral fellow, he did my PhD at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF), and then I moved to the University of New South Wales (Australia). He is currently reseracher at the University of Washington in St Louis.
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Former postdoc, he is an evolutionary biologist interested in the processes that shaped current biodiversity and affect organisms' responses to environmental changes. I considered a range of animal model species to investigate specific mechanisms, and lead large scale comparative analyses to determine global patterns. He also did postdocs in Lefebvre lab at McGill University (Canada) and in Rick Shine's lab at the University of Sydney (Australia). He is interested in a broad array of topics, including cognition, sexual selection, biological invasions, conservation biology and evolutionary biology. He is currently postdoc at Cambridge University.
Mar Unzeta
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Former PhD student, her main interests are the evolution of life history strategies. She has been leading the research in jackdaws in the lab.
Joan was a formed PhD student, interested in the causes and consequences of life history variation. He combines models with comparative studies.
My research focuses on the ecological factors affecting spatial distribution and population dynamics of species, paying particular attention to the effects of human-induced environmental changes. I have also wide interest in conservation and the development and application of modelling tools to guide relevant conservation and management decision making. Part of my research has centred in agricultural and marine systems and species of conservation concern. Currently, I am mostly focusing on biological invasions, trying to understand which traits of species and the spatial configuration of habitat affect spatio-temporal dynamics of invasion trends as well as its potential consequences on risk predictions.
I am a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoc fellow, interested on how human-induced environmental changes alter spatio-temporal dynamics of species distribution and mutualistic interactions at both population and community levels. Currently, I aim to assess the extent to which the replacement of natural habitats by human-made habitats decreases taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity of avian communities. ResearchGate; ResearchID; ORCID
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I'am an evolutionary ecologist, with broad interests in ecology and evolution, particularly in factors regulating diversity patterns. I did my PhD student on the causes and consequences of variation in brain size in birds, and then moved to the University of Goteborg (Sweden) to investigate extinction processes on island. More recently, I worked at CBER (University College, London) and I'm currently a postdoctoral fellow at CREAF.
I am an ecologist interested in the causes and consequences of biodiversity variation, focusing my research on investigating which factors contribute to the structure and distribution of animal communities. I did my MSc thesis with Cesc Múrria at the University of Barcelona, integrating biogeography with functional richness and phylogenetic structure for examining the diversity patterns of aquatic communities. I continued my scientific training in CIBIO-InBIO at the University of Porto applying metabarcoding approaches for species detection and ecosystem management. Currently, I am developing my PhD thesis project based on the study of species response in front of habitat alterations and, particularly, how behaviour and life history interact to influence population dynamics on birds.
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I am particularly interested in the role of the GIS as a tool to improve planning and management of biodiversity and natural resources conservation. In 2010 I fully joined the ETCSIA-UAB team giving support in the development of GIS tools for spatial and environmental data processing, and the implementation of methodologies for analyzing the effects of policies on environmental vectors (such as biodiversity, agricultural environment, etc.) at different scales, from regional to European level. In 2014 I started my thesis in Sol lab.