Martin Mayer from the University College of Southeast Norway will defend his PhD on the 29th September, at 11.00 at Campus Bø, Norway. Martin has been a great contribution to the IRSAE Network, and he invites the network to attend his trial lecture and defence in Bø.

The title of his PhD project is “Territoriality and life history strategies of the Eurasian beaver”, which is part of the larger LEBE research project.

His PhD is about the social organization of Eurasian beavers. Martin has mostly been interested in questions related to territoriality, but also concerning dispersal. His study population is located in Southern Norway (Telemark) where beavers are live-captured between March and October every year. The study has been running for 16 years, and they aim to mark beavers with ear tags and microchips to get information about the fate of optimally each individual in our study population.

For his PhD, Martin has equipped beavers with GPSs and accelerometers, which are glued to the back of the animals. This information was then used to investigate patrolling behaviour and habitat use (from the GPS data) and detect different behaviour with the accelerometers (swimming, feeding, scent-marking) in order to answer ecological questions (e.g. to investigate the costs of territoriality and to describe patterns in scent-marking behaviour).