AniMove Lecturers and Board

Kamran Safi

founding member, movement ecology, MPI-O
Kami is leading the Computational Ecology lab at the Max-Planck Institute for Ornithology at Radolfzell where he studies animal movement in relation to environmental resources and change. In his lab they work on the challenges and opportunities that large movement data bring. They develop methods to address some inherent issues that the constantly growing volume and granularity that modern tags provide. Ultimately they want to understand the individual environment association and try to extrapolate on higher level ecological processes such as population dynamics, disease spread or ecosystem service, as well as conservation.

Martin Wegmann

founding member, remote sensing, University Wuerzburg/DLR
Martin is based at the remote sensing department of Prof. S. Dech, head of DLR-DFD (German Aerospace Data Center) in Würzburg where he leads the Remote Sensing and Biodiversity research topic. Moreover he is an assistant professor at the Global Change Ecology M.Sc. Program and the point of contact for the CEOS Biodiversity initiative, which aims at coordinating space borne activities for biodiversity and conservation related activities. He is lecturer at the EAGLE and GCE M.Sc. program and also leads the EcoSens.org activity.

Thomas Mueller

animal movement ecology, BIK-F

Thomas is a Junior Professor at the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre and the Goethe University Frankfurt. He is addressing theoretical and applied questions in ecology using animal movement data. These range from understanding behavioral mechanisms and social interactions of populations to macro-ecological patterns across species and regions. He is particularly interested in understanding the interactions between moving animals and their environment and their implications for conserving biodiversity in human modified landscapes.

Chloe Bracis

movement ecology, BiK-F
Chloe is a postdoc in the Movement Ecology Group at the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre BiK-F in Frankfurt, Germany where she studies how animals make decisions about where to move and then carry out these movements. She is interested in how explicitly considering movement and cognition can change our understanding of animal behavior. She has created simulation models to investigate these questions across a range of scales and contexts. She has worked on the mechanisms underlying the homeward migration of Chinook salmon from the ocean to the river mouth, how memory influences foraging behavior and food-safety tradeoffs in predator-prey interactions, and identifying drivers of large-scale movements of terrestrial mammals.

Justin Calabrese

animal movement, Smithsonian

Justin Calabrese is a staff scientist and leader of the quantiative ecology lab at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. His general interests lie at the interface of theoretical ecology, statistics, and empirical ecology. He focuses on developing quantitative methods for analyzing animal relocation data, and making these techniques accessible a broad user audience. Justin is particularly interested in robustly quantifying animal space use and relating those estimates back to conservation issues. In addition, he studies how phenology affects the dynamics of both seasonal insect populations, and of emerging vector-borne diseases.

Björn Reineking

animal movement ecology, IRSTEA

Björn is Directeur de Recherche at Irstea in Grenoble. He is interested in the mechanisms that determine the distribution and abundance of organisms at various spatial scales. A particular focus lies on the interplay of species traits, dynamic processes like movement, and environmental conditions. He employs a wide range of modelling approaches, from process-oriented, individual based models to more traditional, phenomenological statistical methods.

Chris Fleming

animal movement, Smithsonian/UMD
Chris is a postdoc at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) and University of Maryland (UMD) where he develops mathematical models, statistical methods, and computational algorithms for animal tracking data. He is interested in addressing the outstanding statistical questions that have strong implications on conservation and wildlife management, such as how much space animals require to live. He appropriates techniques from physics, geostatistics, and engineering when appropriate, while also deriving new analyses as necessary.

Benjamin Leutner

remote sensing and animal movement, DLR-EOC
Benni is a postdoc at the German Aerospace Center (DLR-EOC), where he works on biodiversity and habitat modeling based on a variety of remote sensing techniques and data sources, ranging from LiDAR to radar and optical data. In his current work he focuses on multi-scale modeling of habitat selection of migratory birds by means of GPS tracking and remote sensing derived landscape descriptors. Amongst others, Benni is interested in machine learning, remote sensing time-series analysis and high-performance computing – and in particular in their application to ecological questions. GIS and spatial data handling are his daily playground, and he is actively involved in geospatial software development for R.

Anne Scharf

movement ecology, MPI-O

Anne is a postdoc in the Computational Ecology lab at the Max-Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell. Through the analysis of movement data, she aims to get a better understanding of how animals interact with their environment and are affected by its changes over time. She mostly works with GPS and acceleration data. She is also exploring the possibilities of gathering remote sensing data with drones, to get higher temporal and spatial resolution of environmental information, that better match the increasing resolution of movement data.

AniMove invited Lecturer

Further colleagues joined us for past AniMoves as lectuer:

• Dr. Nathalie Pettorelli
• Dr. Ned Horning
• Dr. Peter Leimgruber
• Dr. Elie Gurarie
• Dr. Georg Wittemyer
• Dr. Bart Kranstauber
• Dr. Marielle van Toor
• Dr. Mirjana Bevanda
• Ruben Remelgado
• Dr. James Cheshire
• Dr. Jared Stabach
• Jakob Schwalb-Willmann