Animal-Environment Interactions

We strive to unveil the inner workings of ecological and evolutionary processes in the natural world through a quantitative and predictive understanding of how the ever-changing environmental conditions impact on animals in the wild, the decisions they evolved to take, and the choices they have learned to make. Our vision is thus a quantitative understanding of how animals depend on, react to, and change their environment by studying their occurrence, distribution and foremost their movements in acknowledgment of the complexity of the evolutionary as well as ecological causes and consequences of these animal-environment interactions.

Ongoing projects

Drylands Project and Vulture Research Consortium

This initiative aims at bringing together a consortium of data owners to study vultures as indicator species of drylands globally, investigating how their movement interacts with water availability and thus can be indicative of desertification processes. more

MoveApps

MoveApps is an open analysis platform for animal tracking data, developed with the aim to make sophisticated analytical tools accessible to a global community of movement ecologists and wildlife managers. MoveApps allows users to interactively design and share workflows composed of analysis modules (Apps) that access and analyse tracking data. Users browse Apps, build workflows, customise parameters, execute analyses and access results through an intuitive web-based interface. more

R package move and move2

The R package move was launched in 2012. Recently an integral basis for move, the sp package, was being superseded, requiring the design of a successor, the move2 package (launched in 2023), allowing for improvement in speed and functionality through redesigning it from scratch, while integrating the experiences gained from its predecessor. more

Juvenile Golden Eagles in the central Alps

The central alpine population of Golden Eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) is at carrying
capacity after being strictly protected since 1850. While much is known about
the life of adults through decades of meticulous research, the period of their lives
as juveniles and immature individuals remains rather obscure. more

Non-migratory island dwelling Turkey vultures movement ecology in Cuba

In recent decades, the utilization of movement tracking systems have allowed ecologists to study with precision the movement of organisms in the wild, specially highly vagile animals like birds. The focus of the research has been centered on long distance movements like migrations. However, there is a lack of information about movement of resident birds, and this is especially acute in places where the overall amount of studies has been historically few, like the Caribbean. more

Movement ecology of oilbirds

Oilbirds (Steatornis caripensis) are cave roosting, nocturnal neotropical frugi- vores that disperse the seeds of many tropical trees. We capitalize on avail- able GPS and accelerometer data stored on Movebank, to understand oilbird movement patterns in Venezuela, and assess individual variation in the cost of foraging and the implications of such differences for population ecology, conservation and ecosystem services. more

E4Warning, early warning system for West-Nile Virus

In this Horizon Europe funded project, we are taking a holistic approach to better understand the interactions between humans, mosquitoes, birds as reservoir species, and the environment to enhance disease intelligence capable of anticipating and identifying the risk and outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases. more

An updated estimation of cost of transport for flying species

This project wants to provide a first assessment of the role of the physical environment in determining cost of transport in the wild. Cost of transport (COT) is defined as the amount of fuel needed to transport a unit of body mass for a unit distance, and flying animals are known to benefit from the energy available in the landscape, mainly in the form of wind currents, to largely reduce this cost. more

Using bird flight to sense fine-scale complex atmospheric flows

At the intersection between flight behaviour and mountain meteorology, this project aims to 1. achieve a profound understanding of soaring flight in complex atmospheric flows, 2. demonstrate the use of bird flight to sense fine-scale atmospheric conditions. more

Evaluating uplift proxies to quantify atmospheric support for flight

Flight is a costly behavior. Atmospheric conditions, namely the speed and direction of horizontal and vertical air currents, play a major role in determining
these costs. Flying animals constantly adjust their flight behavior to exploit the energy available in the atmosphere while avoiding conditions which increase
their costs of flight. more

Learning to soar: a multi-species investigation

Flight behavior is, at least partially, progressively acquired during a bird’s early life stages. In soaring birds, this process involves learning to interact with the physical environment to effectively extract energy from it.
more

Flight repertoire of terrestrial birds over the open sea

It has long been assumed that soaring birds are confined to flight over land-
masses and avoid flying over the open sea. Soaring flight depends on thermals
which are strongest when the sun heats up the earth’s surface and causes the
warm air to rise. more