Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL

Dr. Dilsad Dagtekin is a Scientist in the Dynamic Macroecology group, with a joint position as an Ecological Modeller shared with InfoFlora, Switzerland’s national data and information centre for wild plants. She works on the further development and application of the Nested Species Distribution Models (N-SDM) pipeline (Adde et al., 2023) as part of the M7: Biodiversity under Climate Change project within Phase II of the Swiss Biodiversity Action Plan, funded by the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN/BAFU). The project aims to develop and scale species distribution models that integrate global and Switzerland-specific climate and species-occurrence data, providing a scientific basis for anticipating biodiversity responses to environmental change and informing future conservation action in Switzerland.

Her work includes developing a web-based tool that will make the N-SDM pipeline accessible to end users, including conservation practitioners, stakeholders, and researchers. She develops data pipelines that integrate global and regional occurrence records across thousands of species, runs multi-species modelling workflows on high-performance computing infrastructure, and collaborates with a consortium of species and modelling experts to evaluate and improve the modelling framework. Through this joint role, she connects methodological development in ecological modelling with applied species monitoring and conservation in Switzerland.

Before joining the Dynamic Macroecology group, Dilsad worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Eawag with Helen Moor and Nele Schuwirth, using metapopulation models and long-term amphibian monitoring data to study population responses to habitat change and evaluate conservation strategies. She completed her PhD in Population Ecology group under Arpat Ozgul at the University of Zurich, where she used long-term ecological data and Bayesian population models to investigate how seasonal environmental variation shapes wildlife populations with varying resolutions of data from different parts of the world (Türkiye, Aldabra, and Madagascar).

Publications

Dagtekin D., Moor H., Schmidt B. R. (2026) Building pondscapes for amphibian metapopulations: forecasting the effects of different conservation strategies. under review - Journal of Applied Ecology

Dagtekin D., Moor H., Sutherland C. (2026) Extinction debts and colonisation lags in the response of spatially structured population to degradation and restoration. under revision

Dagtekin D., Behr D. M., Fichtel C., Kappeler P. M., Ozgul A. (2026) Seasonal survival of a short-lived primate under changing climate and population density. under review - Journal of Animal Ecology

Dagtekin D., Ertürk A., Sommer S., Ozgul A., Soyumert A. (2023). Seasonal habitat-use patterns of large mammals in a human-dominated landscape. Journal of Mammalogy, doi.org/10.1093/jmammal/gyad107

Dagtekin, D., Şahan, E. A., Denk, T., Köse, N., & Dalfes, H. N. (2020). Past, present and future distributions of Oriental beech (Fagus orientalis) under climate change projections. PLoS ONE, doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0242280