Bauer-junior lab Migration ecology: cues, timing & prediction

Many different animals of multiple taxa engage in seasonal or life-stage migrations. Although those migrations differ in many respects, e.g. in the way of locomotion, the distances covered, the body changes made, etc., migrants typically face similar fundamental challenges namely “WHERE to go”, dealing with orientation and navigation, and “WHEN to go”, dealing with the timing of activities and migration schedules.

To find solutions to these questions, animals probably rely on environmental information but also on their physiological state. Thus, they respond to external and internal cues to tune their behaviour to their (changing) requirements and to the development of their seasonal environments.  

Thus, such cues are highly relevant but we seriously lack a good understanding of the nature of such cues as well as their quantitative effect on timing. Therefore, we aim to advance our understanding of the cues and of how animals make the (right) decisions before and during migration (proximate factors).  We are mainly interested in the timing of migration (but also other life-history activities) and how different animals find solutions to these similar basic questions – where the answers differ and why they differ.

Furthermore, we are interested in the use of information during migration – are conditions along flyways related over larger geographical distances (and/or over time) and can animals make use of such relations? How, then, would this alter their migrations? 

We mainly approach these questions with theoretical methods – ranging from simple analytical to complex state-dependent or individual-based models – and these models are usually developed in close collaboration with (empirical) collaborators.

Please find more information on current projects on Silke Bauer’s personal page.

Current lab members

Tamara Emmenegger (external, MSc student at the University of Bern, Switzerland)

Rien van Wijk (external, PhD student at the Swiss Ornithological Institute, Switzerland)

Former lab members

Rob de Boer (MSc student Wageningen University)

Karen Callaway (MSc student University of Fribourg, Switzerland)

Pauline Maas (MSc student University Amsterdam, NL)

Katherine Parker (MSc student University Amsterdam, NL)

Rudy Jonker  (MSc student Wageningen University)

This is the advertisement to a workshop organised at the Lorentz-Center in Leiden (NL) that brought together leading scientists in the field of empirical and theoretical approaches to migration. Please find more details on the meeting here.