Renée Lejeune

I am a PhD student at the department of Ecology. My interests are primarily focussed on biodiversity and climate change in the Northern ecosystems (Arctic and Boreal), how species are affected and what this implies for interaction networks. My PhD project is about insect and plant biodiversity on clearcuts in production forests and the impacts of climate change.

I have a BSc in Biology and MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Restoration from the University of Antwerp. In my Master´s thesis work I investigated the potential of climate change to cause mismatches within a plant-bumblebee interaction network on Mt Nuolja in the Scandinavian tundra. After my Master, I assisted in many climate related research projects, mainly focussing on the ecology of plant communities, at the Climate Impacts Research Center (Umeå University) in Abisko, northern Sweden. Additionally, I worked as a temporary researcher at the Belgian Institute for Nature and Forest Research (INBO) to map agricultural breeding birds and observe nesting/foraging behaviour.

Main supervisor: Thomas Ranius

Assistant supervisors: Erik Öckinger, Diana Rubene and Andres Baselga

Cantwell-Jones, A., Everson, J., Bates, O. K., Al-Hayali, A. M. R., Allen, G., Berard, L., Caliebe, F., Egleston, S., Hudson, L., James, J. A. S., Jung, L., Kattan, M., Lejeune, R., Svedin, J., van Brakel, S., van Unen, M., Tylianakis, J. M., Larson, K., & Gill, R. J. (2025). Phenological turnover matters when making trait-based predictions of plant–pollinator interactions. Functional Ecology, 39, 2509–2525.

https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.70113

(PREPRINT) Lejeune, R., Fuentes‐Lillo, E., Haesen, S., Pirée, A., Wiegmans, D., Hostens, L., Lenoir, J., Pergl, J., Vítková, M., Seipel, T.F., Kutlvašr, J., Núñez, M.A., Dimarco, R.D., Alexander, J.M., Backes, A.R., Haider, S., Pauchard, A., Nijs, I., & Lembrechts, J.J. (2024). Mountain roads across the globe significantly alter local soil microclimates. bioRxiv. 

https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.11.28.625797