Dr. Martina Scacco

Animal movement results from a balance of the need to move, the individual capacities and all the external factors affecting the movement (movement ecology paradigm). I am particularly interested in the latter, that is how, and to what extent, the environment affects the movement patterns of different species.

I find in soaring birds an ideal playground for understanding this relationship, due to their large-scale movements and their strict dependence on the support of atmospheric uplifts to move across the landscape. Understanding the level of this dependence allows us, as a scientific community, to predict their movements in different environmental scenarios, both current and future, taking into account potential conservation applications.
I am currently using available movement data (collected mainly through gps and accelerometers) to relate the flight behaviour of different soaring species to their environmental context, to understand and predict the movement patterns of these birds and their cost of movement across the landscape at different spatial and temporal scales. I am also interested in comparing the interplay of flight behaviour, energy expenditure and environment across different soaring species, to evaluate to what extent different morphologies can define their degree of dependence on the landscape and potentially their differential sensitivity to changes in the environment.

Visit these links to learn more about my ongoing projects and collaborations:

• An updated estimation of cost of transport for flying species
• Drylands project and vulture research consortium
• Using bird flight to sense fine-scale complex atmospheric flows
• Evaluating uplift proxies to quantify atmospheric support for flight
• Juvenile Golden Eagles in the central Alps