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].
- D. Campos V. Mendez and F. Bartumeus, Stochastic Foundations in Movement Ecology (Springer, Berlin, 2014).
- D. Boyer and P.D. Walsh. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. London Series A 368 5645 (2010).
- V.V. Palyulin, A.V. Chechkin and R. Metzler. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 111, 2931 (2014).
- L. Giuggioli, S. Perez-Becker, and D.P. Sanders. Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 058103 (2013).
- F. Lenz, T.Ings, A.V.Chechkin, L.Chittka, R.Klages, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 098103 (2012).
- 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).