Abstract
Animal movement has implications for species interactions and survival, for ecosystem functioning and for human-wildlife interactions. To conduct research at the forefront of animal movement ecology, interdisciplinary research is essential, especially when developing tools to study movement at diverse scales and make data accessible for current and long term collaboration . The aim of our research is to improve the understanding of the mechanisms that shape animal movement strategies at the individual level and subsequent consequences for individuals, populations or ecosystems. The research focuses mainly on birds in the wild, often with an emphasis on migratory species and flight behaviour. We use complementary techniques such as global GPS-tracking of individual birds, radar monitoring, big data analytics, and mechanistic modelling approaches. The long-term goal is to understand how individuals adapt their movement strategies to environmental change (abiotic and biotic drivers), what the costs, benefits and constraints of different strategies are, and whether behavioural diversity is important for population persistence. In order to understand the complexity of such interactions the group integrates knowledge from ecology, physiology, earth science and meteorology. Within this project we request HPC computing time and custom cloud solutions to operationalise the e-science infrastructure needed for our data intensive research. The virtual labs we will design will provide research with access to bio-logging data and data derivatives, data visualization and annotation tools and access to radar products used to monitor aerial flows of animal movements including continental migrations.
Netherlands