Anaïs Vignoles
awarded the prize for the Best Talk
During the 6th edition of VCWAP, 46 early-career women researchers gave talks on Zoom. Among them, Anaïs Vignoles’s presentation stood out and was awarded Best Talk. Thanks to our sponsor Transmitting Science (thank you!), Anaïs won a €400 voucher to use on any of their course, consulting service, or coaching session. Congratulations, Anaïs, on this well-deserved recognition!
About the talk: ‘Using the R package 'biosurvey' to guide palaeontological surveys towards unsampled paleoclimates’ by Anaïs L. Vignoles, Corentin Gibert-Bret, Frank N. Kanyamula, Felipe Walter Pereira, Anahi S. Quezada & Jean-Renaud Boisserie
Anaïs Vignoles presented a study exploring how ecological niche modeling can be improved and applied to guide paleontological fieldwork. Using the R package biosurvey, she tested a workflow designed to maximize sampled environments range within the study area, with the aim of better capturing the full range of ecological conditions occupied by species. Focusing on African Pliocene mammals, her approach highlight regions identified as climatically unique. This method provides a concrete way to target underexplored paleoenvironments and refine paleoecological niche reconstructions.
Meet Anaïs Vignoles
Anaïs Vignoles holds a Bachelor’s degree in Earth and Environmental Sciences and a Master’s in Prehistory from the University of Bordeaux in France. Her Master’s thesis marked her first encounter with ecological niche modeling and stone tools technology. Since, she has focused on developing an interdisciplinary research that closely combines prehistoric archaeology, palaeoclimate modeling and ecological niche modeling to contribute to a better understanding of large-scale society-environment interactions in the deep past. She defended her PhD in 2021 focusing on these questions for pre-LGM societies of the Gravettian in France (32-26 000 cal. BP). In 2024, she was awarded a Marie-Curie post-doctoral fellowship to expand her approach to Central Europe, as well as explore new theoretical and methodological avenues of research using ecological niche modeling to study the past.
As part of her secondment research stay in 2025 at the Biodiversity Institute of the University of Kansas (a.k.a KU, in Lawrence, KS, USA), she worked closely with KU’s graduate students in Ecology and Evolution and French paleontologist and palaeoecologist colleagues to think about environmental biases of the paleontological and archaeological records, in an effort to better understand the challenges of modeling extinct species niches.
Today, Anaïs is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cologne, working in the framework of the ECOLITHIC project (PI : Shumon T. Hussain), a fascinating project aimed at rethinking how we study stone tools technology evolution in a deep-time perspective.
To find out more, follow Anaïs’ work on social media: