AniMove Lecturers and Board

Kamran Safi

founding member, movement ecology, MPI-AB
Kami is leading the Computational Ecology lab at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) 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.

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.

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.

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