Understanding our planet's biodiversity has never been more urgent. Technological advances are creating exciting opportunities to study wildlife at unprecedented scales, but we’re just now unlocking the insights that this tidal wave of data holds. Our group works to create new perspectives on how humans and wildlife can coexist in an era of rapid change.
Team
Our Work
COVID-19 Bio-Logging Initiative
As the pandemic disrupted life around the world we helped form a research consortium, the COVID-19 Bio-Logging Initiative, realizing that the widespread disruptions to human activities could enable deep mechanistic understanding into human-wildlife interactions. The Initiative is a community-wide research effort to support human-wildlife coexistence using animal movement data. Endorsed as a UN Ocean Decade project, the Initiative welcomes and supports collaboration of all types. The following work in our group are sub-projects of the Initiative.
Impact of our presence
Understanding anthropogenic impacts requires considering the many ways we influence wildlife, including our physical presence. However, a lack of accessible data has directly hindered progress. Through collaboration, we have been working to quantify the impacts of our presence on wildlife and advocate for greater access to human mobility data for sustainability research.
Leads: Ruth Oliver, Scott Yanco
Sharing protected areas
California has set the ambitious goal of protecting 30% of the state by 2030 (30x30) with the dual goals of protecting biodiversity and expanding equitable access to nature. Funded by the Nature Conservancy and Point Conception Institute, we are working to understand the nuances of how wildlife cope with human activity within protected areas.
Leads: Ruth Oliver, Allie Caughman
Ecology of death
In the face of the largest extinction event in human history, we struggle to understand why. In collaboration with Dr. Scott Yanco, our group is working to leverage the data revolution in animal tracking to diagnose why animals die. Doing so will allow us to pinpoint how the major threats faced by wildlife worldwide.
Leads: Ruth Oliver, Scott Yanco
Past Work
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Global biodiversity data
Global efforts to curb biodiversity loss require robust data to assess species status and trends. We developed novel indicators to assess biodiversity data gaps and track progress in closing them.
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Camera traps as eyes on wildlife
Surveying wildlife with automated cameras is growing in popularity due to ease of use. We showed that these technologies are helping to close biodiversity data gaps.
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Eavesdropping on the Arctic
Audio data can give incredible insight into the activities of vocal animals, but is challenging to work with. We developed signal processing and machine learning methods to estimate when songbirds made it to their Arctic breeding grounds.
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Small birds, big moves
Migratory birds have a big challenge: climate change is impacting their habitats at different rates. Using state-of-the-art GPS devices, we showed that robins make decisions en route to their breeding grounds that help them shift their overall migration timing.
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Arctic animals on the move
Our work contributed to a large-scale collaboration to bring together the movements of nearly a hundred Arctic species spanning three decades.
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