The Team

  • Frederic Bartumeus is an ICREA Research Professor in Computational and Theoretical Ecology at the Centre for Advanced Studies of Blanes (CEAB-CSIC). He is the head of the Movement Ecology Laboratory and the Computational Biology Laboratory at CEAB-CSIC. Frederic holds an associate research position at the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF). His research is focused on the emerging field of movement ecology, which aims to reveal the complex forces that drive movement and dispersal patterns of animals (including humans). For this purpose improved tracking technology is used (GPS, bio-loggers, smart-phones), which demands an integrative view combined with new computational tools and modeling framework. A central question in his research is how animals use information and their motor properties to optimize search strategies [1].

  • Denis Boyer is Associate Professor at the Complex Systems Department of the Institute of Physics, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Over the past decade he has been part of a number of interdisciplinary collaborations on the analysis and modeling of animal movements, in particular in non-human primates and seabirds. His research focuses on animal mobility in complex environments. With the help of agent-based modeling, he has studied problems such as the effects of mental maps on individual movements, or how detection patterns are determined by heterogeneous prey distributions. He also works on the relations between memory use and home range emergence, and develops models of random walks with memory [2].

  • Aleksei (Oleksii) V. Chechkin is Leading Staff Scientist at the Akhiezer Institute for Theoretical Physics NAS Ukraine and Adjunct Professor at the Kharkov National University. At present his main topics of research are: kinetic theory, including theory of kinetic equations with fractional derivatives; theory of random processes and fields with non-Gaussian Levy statistics and long-memory properties; aging and ergodicity breaking phenomena in non-Brownian random walks. Recently he participated in several projects on diffusion and foraging behavior of biological objects, such as spatiotemporal dynamics of bumblebees foraging under predation risk, anomalous fluctuation relations for biological cell migration, and optimization of random search processes in presence of external drifts [3].

  • Luca Giuggioli is Senior Lecturer in Engineering Mathematics and deputy director of the Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences. He is Co-founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Movement Ecology. Luca’s research expertise is on mathematical models of animal movement and interaction. His studies over the last three years have focused on developing a theory for the so-called territorial random walkers on the collective emergence of animal spacing patterns. Recently he has directed his interest towards the implications of heterogeneous spacing of territorial animals on encounter statistics and on spatio-temporal spread of infectious disease [4].

  • Rainer Klages is Reader in Applied Mathematics and Director of Postgraduate Research Studies at Queen Mary University of London. His research in nonlinear dynamics and nonequilibrium statistical physics focuses on understanding the interplay between correlations in spatio-temporal dynamics and diffusive transport in complex systems. In recent years he got especially interested in anomalous diffusion. Starting from experimental data analysis he applied the theory of anomalous stochastic processes to understand the dynamics of cell migration and bumblebee flights [5].
    As a convenor Rainer offers the expertise of having scientifically coordinated the London Dynamical Systems Group for three years, which brought together scientists from four different universities across London. He was the main organizer of three international conferences and the main editor of two multi-author textbooks written by international teams of experts. That he is able to take scientific responsibility was recently confirmed by his appointment as Divisional Associate Editor for Physical Review Letters

  • Jon Pitchford is Senior Lecturer in the Departments of Mathematics and Biology at the University of York. He has worked on theoretical models and data analysis relating to movement in biology for more than 10 years. His work places stochastic foraging strategies within a rigorous ecological and evolutionary context, with motivation from fisheries, sustainable agriculture, food webs and pollination networks [6].
  1. D. Campos V. Mendez and F. Bartumeus, Stochastic Foundations in Movement Ecology (Springer, Berlin, 2014).
  2. D. Boyer and P.D. Walsh. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. London Series A 368 5645 (2010).
  3. V.V. Palyulin, A.V. Chechkin and R. Metzler. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 111, 2931 (2014).
  4. L. Giuggioli, S. Perez-Becker, and D.P. Sanders. Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 058103 (2013).
  5. F. Lenz, T.Ings, A.V.Chechkin, L.Chittka, R.Klages, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 098103 (2012).
  6. J. Pitchford, Applications of search in biology: some open problems in: S. Alpern et al. (Eds.), Search theory: a game theoretic perspective, p.295–303 (Springer, New York, 2013).