The workshop was absolutely wonderful. The talks were very interesting, topical, and several gave me new ideas that I am working on incorporating in my own research. The organisers put a full two hours of informal collaboration time into the schedule during the day, which allowed me to have many worthwhile discussions. Two, in particular, I expect to lead to at least one and possibly two new collaborations. Finally, I am part of a sub-group of workshop attendees which, as part of the workshop, defined a project that we are hoping to continue over the next few months, leading to a review publication.

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At this workshop I presented results from a paper (R.S. Cantrell, C. Cosner, M.A. Lewis, and Y.Lou, Evolution of dispersal in spatial population models with multiple timescales, J. Math. Biol. (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00285-018-1302-2) which introduced a new approach to modeling the evolution of dispersal. That paper was directly inspired by discussions I had with other participants during a previous workshop at BIRS. I also had discussions that I expect will result in further research with some of those collaborators based on ideas from that paper. Additionally, I had discussions with another participant in the workshop where we exchanged information which will help me advance my research on another topic related to modeling animal dispersal, and which may result in new collaborative research. The workshop was very useful to me.

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I would like to use this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to you personally for the wonderful hospitality of BIRS and the truly unique role that it plays in promoting and facilitating the research and progress across the mathematical sciences. It has been the third time for me to visit BIRS over the last several years, and all three times were very useful and fruitful both for my own work and, as far as I am able to judge, for the research in this particular field (which is mathematical ecology) more generally. In particular, this last workshop was extremely invigorating: a new collaboration started and an informal working group was created, currently working together on mathematical challenges in ecological management.

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The BIRS workshop on New Mathematical Methods for Complex Systems in Ecology was tremendously inspiring. I could meet the leaders of the field and got inspiration for a new research idea to study the statistical mechanics of oscillations in complex food webs.

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I met a number of experts in the field of ecology who are very interested to talk to and work with mathematicians. In particular, we had a series of interesting discussions that led to new insights on the problem of species adapting to contemporary climate change, initiated work on a new paper, and will likely lead to new long-term collaborations.

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