Ursula Torres received the “Resilience” award for her talk at the NZ Ecological Society Conference 16-20 November 2014, Palmerston North. Her talk was titled “The realized climatic niche of freshwater invertebrates: Are they stable?” Ursula also was awarded first prize at the Lincoln Post Graduate Conference in the Bio-Protection Research Centre Session, 7-8th July 2014, Lincoln University.
Ursula gained her BSc and two MSc (Hons) in Ecology and Modelling at Paul Sabatier University (Toulouse, France).After her MSc she worked on a European project (CAFNET) where she studied the impact of coffee management on cavity nesting birds in the Western Ghats (India). She then joined the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) and worked on biotic interactions in saproxylic beetles. At the Bio-protection Research Centre, Ursula’s work will be under the supervision of Sue Worner and is funded by the Erasmus Mundus NESSIE Project. Her PhD will focus on modelling global distributions and risk of establishment of invasive freshwater invertebrates.