Ongoing Projects:
Movement data integration within Map of Life
This project involves developing infrastructure and user interface updates to support the integration of animal movementment within Map of Life. This will allow the visualization of movement data within the context of other biodiversity data.
Digital Museum of Animal Lives
Near-real time tracking offers the potential to engage society broadly in the digital documentation of tracked animals’ lives and promote understanding of the growing challenges to their survival. The platform will allow users to explore animal’s trajectories as well as support aggregate products summarizing their behavior and space use.
Borrowing strength between species to advance species distribution knowledge
Recent advances in species distribution modeling have enabled ecologists to make predictions about multiple species simultaneously, which may allow models to borrow strength between data rich and poor species. The MPYC hosted a virtual workshop of SDM and MSDM experts to brainstorm collectively about potential existing or future solutions to this shortcoming of MSDM research which resulted in a perspective piece currently in preparation.
Estimating local population abundance from movement data
Spatially explicit cross-taxa estimates of local population abundance are critical for conservation planning. MPYC researchers used animal tracking data combined with local environmental data to estimate population-specific home-range size and abundance across taxa and integrates these estimates into spatial conservation prioritization schemes.
Contribution of animal movement to global biodiversity data
Protecting biodiversity in the face of rapid, ongoing environmental change requires detailed understanding of species’ distributions, movements, and habitat preferences. MPYC researchers are assessing the contribution of animal movement data in closing global biodiversity data gaps.
Animals as environmental sensors
Global descriptions of meteorological conditions and environmental variation are key to understanding and projecting the health of our plant. However, meteorological data remains highly geographically biased. Due to recent advances in sensor technology, animal tracking devices can now provide fine scale measurements of meteorological variables, thus potentially turning wild animals into mobile weather sensors. MPYC researchers are demonstrating the potential for animals to act as “biological buoys” observing our planet’s climate.
1000 Cranes: transforming our understanding of the lives of an enigmatic group of species
Effects of pandemic-related changes in human behavior on mobile organisms

Complete Projects:
Spatiotemporal Observation Annotation Tool (STOAT)

CHELSA-EarthEnv precipitation product

Hypervolume-based niche characterizations
Quantifying species environmental niches is critical to many ecological studies, however doing so is complicated by computational limits and sensitivity to dimensionality. This new framework allows for quantifying n-dimensional niches for species by avoiding many previous issues. Read the related publication here.
Integrating biodiversity data types for species’ range models
Biodiversity observations are becoming available at an unprecedented rate through citizen science observations, animal movement data, digitized museum specimens, and remotely sensed species observations, among other sources. As these data sources grow, estimating species distributions for many taxa at fine spatial and temporal resolutions may become possible in ways that have thus far only been feasible over small extents. We developed a flexible framework that can incorporate many different data types in a unified model to estimate species abundance and distribution patterns, while overcoming potentially small or biased samples for many species.
Individual niche variation

Spatial scale of individual space use
Identifying the scale at which individuals perceive and respond to their environment is critical for accurate characterization of species niches. MPYC researchers discovered that animal selection for environmental conditions occurs at multiple scales.
Backcasting bird migrations
Migration is a widespread response in birds to seasonally varying climates. As seasonality is particularly pronounced during interglacial periods, this raises the question of the significance of bird migration during past periods with different patterns of seasonality. MPYC researchers simulated bird migration over the past 50,000 years and showed that migration has persisted throughout Earth’s glacial cycles. Read the article in Nature Communications here, and the YaleNews coverage here.
Animal tracking data moves community ecology
Following the 2019 MPYC symposium on “Linking individual behaviour to community responses in changing landscapes”, a subgroup of participants formulated and constructed a perspective on how to link variation in individual behavior to questions in community ecology.