It was a great MESS – Movement Ecology Summer School 2015

The second Movement Ecology Summer School, organized by the Ozgul’s group as part of the PhD Program in Ecology of the Life Science Zurich Graduate School, has been a great success. Twenty-five highly motivated students from UZH/ETHZ and from overseas gathered at the Ostello-Cappuccini in Faido (Ticino) for what has been an inspiring and productive week.

Under the guidance and supervision of leading scientists (Gabriela S, John F, Luca B, Garrett S, Frank P and Gabriele C) the participants learned to source and manipulate remote sensing imagery, to decompose movement trajectories, to compute home ranges and investigate habitat selection. All these skills combined were used to disentangle the movement behavior of Apollo, Botswana’s most famous spotted hyena!

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The movements of Apollo were thoroughly analysed during the entire week. All results pointed towards a univocal conclusion: Apollo is by far Botswana’s most famous spotted hyena.

 

Participants had the opportunity to alternate high-quality lectures with social activities, which had the scope to create a cohesive group and promote interactions and establish future collaborations.

fun
Great food, amazing people, stunning weather were the recipe for a successful week
work
And we also worked hard! Very hard!. Despite Prof Börger and Prof Street attempts nobody fell asleep…almost.

We received very positive feedbacks from all participants, which is very encouraging, and we are therefore keen to offer a similar, and even more exciting, course during the summer 2017! Stay tuned on this blog if you want to be part of the next MESS and learn everything about Apollo!

 

The CMR Curse

An epic adaptation of the downfall rant to the capture-mark-recapture world. This was prepared for the retirement symposium of Dr. Jim Nichols, one of the most influential quantitative wildlife ecologists of our times.

 

Board games for conservation management

As a PhD student in ecology, I always thought of my interest for board games as a mere hobby without any connection with my work. A field course in conservation management organised by Jaboury Ghazoul and Claude Garcia in the Norther West Highlands in Scotland unexpectedly changed my perception.

The course had for setting a land of stark beauty; melancholic lochs and glens dominated by dramatic mountains, and majestic Scots pines standing above heather moorland in remnants of the ancient Caledonian forest. To get a glimpse of land management in this part of Scotland, interviews were organised with natural reserve rangers, foresters, large private estate owners, crofters (usually tenants of a small agricultural unit mostly producing lamb and beef), managers of community-owned estates and interested citizens. Ignoring the rain, enduring the midges, suffering the occasional sunburn and fighting off the ticks, the keen students that we are bombarded the interviewees with questions.

A great variety of management objectives are expressed by stakeholders. Some lands are managed to enhance recreational and aesthetic value, some for their conservation value, and others for generating revenue by growing commercial timber, generating energy, or even sheep farming to some extent (although all estates need funding, some management plans are encouraged by grants). Many estates fulfil not one but several of these objectives. For example, on the estate managed by the Forestry Commission, some plots were for timber production, others for native woodland restoration.

We saw that different objectives can lead to the same management plan. The rangers at the Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve plant native trees for conservation, local communities do it to establish woodlands for recreation, and large land-owners plant because it is a source of income through government grants.

There are tensions and conflicts, and, in the western highlands of Scotland, deer often lie at the heart of these tensions. Overgrazing by deer is the major threat to reforestation success. Restoration of pine trees requires tree planting, but also deer control, largely by culling (deer stalking). But some stakeholders, such as the large sports hunting estates, derive a large share of their incomes on deer stalking, and do not appreciate the reduction of deer numbers for conservation or community interests.

Indoors, we unravelled information gleaned from the different stakeholders, in all its complexity. We identified issues, actors, resources, and the interactions among them. We discussed and debated interpretations and perspectives. We eventually had the skeleton of a multi-agent system. Agents are autonomous entities actively interacting with their environment and the resources in the system according to certain rules. The consequences of their actions affects their surroundings and in turn trigger responses from the agents. Once the links are reasonably well identified and quantified, it is possible to translate this system into a game.  Although we did not go that far during the course, some of the students had earlier constructed games based on their understanding at that time of Scotland case study. Some groups created board games, other computer games. And the results look astonishingly like Agricola, a strategy board game in which players embody farmers exploiting their land (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31260/agricola).

Constructing such games can facilitate a clearer understanding of highly complex socio-ecological systems, and allow the development of insights to managing natural resources. The games, based on the description of the stakeholders’ understanding of the situation, their objectives and their needs, are one way by which participatory modelling might directly engage stakeholders in the decision-making process. Stakeholders can actually play such games to explore different management strategies and possible find solutions to resource management. We learn, and it’s fun!

What better way to link my enthusiasm for ecology and for board games?

Popecol group started to form postwomen and postmen

Do Swiss people support or oppose wild living wolves in Switzerland? Do wolves encounter a positive “human environment” in areas with suitable habitat conditions? To answer these questions, Gabriele and I are conducting a mail survey among a random sample of the Swiss population. In order to master the logistics of mailing out 10’000 questionnaires, the Popecol group jumped in with many supporting hands.

Questionnaire about people's attitude towards the wolf in Switzerland
Questionnaire about people’s attitude towards the wolf in Switzerland

A questionnaire with sections on attitude, perception and knowledge of the wolf, experience with the wolf and personal information about the respondent was developed and translated into German, French and Italian. Before going big and mailing out 10’000 questionnaires, a pre-study with 200 randomly chosen people was conducted. So far the pre-study yielded a return rate of almost 30%, which is higher than expected. With this first promising outcome in mind the time was ripe for undertaking the logistics of printing, folding and packing 10’000 questionnaires.

With great support of the Popecol group, the first packing round successfully went off without a hitch. In groups of two helpers, the questionnaires were packed in envelopes together with a cover letter and a return envelope. So far, the first 4’000 questionnaires are on the way to be delivered to the randomly chosen respondents all over Switzerland. The last packing round is scheduled and the remaining questionnaires are planned to be sent out soon.

Envelope packing procedure performed by the Population Ecology group
Envelope packing procedure performed by the Population Ecology group

Thanks again for the great support and let’s keep our fingers crossed for a high return rate!

Movement Ecology Summer School 2015

On the basis of the success obtained in 2013, our group, and in collaboration with the Life Science Zurich Graduate School,  is proud to announce the upcoming Movement Ecology Summer School 2015  that will be held in Faido, in the heart of the Swiss Alps (August 23–28 2015). We already secured the contribution of leading scientist: Prof. Luca Börger, Prof. John Fieberg, Dr. Gabriela Schaepman-Strub, Dr. Frank Pennekamp, Dr. Gabriele Cozzi.

PhD students from UZH and ETHZ will have priority, but few places shall be available for external participants too.

This one-week course covers several aspects of animal movement ecology and includes both theoretical/conceptual and practical sessions.

The course builds on analytical complexity and leads the participant through several steps. During day one, the participants will learn to source landscape information through available remote sensing imagery and to import, manipulate and represent geographical data into R. Day two will be dedicated to the decomposition of movement trajectories and characterisation of movement modes and phases. During day three the participants will be exposed to common methods used in the calculation of home ranges and discuss the pros and cons. During the next day we will use presence/absence data to analyze habitat selection and create species distribution models. Finally, during the last day, the participants will be exposed to some new tools and methodologies to include data from alternative sensors (e.g. accelerometers) in the study of animal movements. Fundamental aspects such as study design, spatial autocorrelation, sources of error and time varying covariates will be discussed.

Data sets will be provided but the participants are encouraged to bring their own data. Basic knowledge in R is required. Participants should bring their own laptop with the latest version of R installed. Active participation during the course is required to obtain the credit points.

Turkish Bears and the Mc’Donald’s effect

…The bears living in the Sarikamis Forest National Park belong to an isolated and relict population not connected to any other larger and viable bear populations…”. This is what we believed two years ago, at the beginning of the project. And we were wrong!

Now, after two years of continuos data collection from 16 GPS radio-collared bears, we are slowly starting to understand their local and regional movement patterns their ecology and social organisation.

Together with our collaborators of the turkish-based NGO Kuzei Doga, the University of Utah, and the University of Zagreb we discovered that our study bears are capable of long-distance movements of more than 100 km. And this across an allegedly hostile and human-dominated landscape. These long distance trips thus allow the bears to reach a larger bear population that lives along the Black Sea coast and across Georgia.

Interestingly, only half of the collared bears undertook these long-distance movements. The other bears never left the surrounding of the Sarikamis forest, instead they regularly visited the Sarikamis city garbage dump.

We were so able to characterise two distinct behavioural morphs: (i) ‘dump bears’ who never left the Sarikamis forest and fed at the city dump, and (ii) ‘wild bears’  who never visited the dump and regularly migrated. As the observed migratory trips happened right before hibernation, we speculate that they are linked to fattening before the winter. This idea is corroborated by the fact that dump bears also increased their visit rate at the dump right before hibernation.

Future work will allow us to tell which of the two strategies is the most adaptive: McDonald fast food or bio-products?

For the time-being we are happy to have made it to the public media.

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Good bye, Raluca!

ralucaAfter one year as a SciEx postdoctoral fellow in the population ecology and the amphibian conservation biology groups, Raluca Bancila returns to Romania.

We greatly enjoyed having Raluca as a member of our groups and wish her all the best for her future.

Our collaboration will continue!

Workshop Announcement: Fitting Flexible State-Space and Hierarchical Models Using the Laplace Approximation and Automatic Differentiation

I, Mollie, am organizing a workshop here at the University of Zurich. I’ve recruited two experts to come help me teach: Hans Skaug (Dept of Mathematics, Univ of Bergen) and Kasper Kristensen (Dept of Applied Maths and Comp Sci, Technical Univ of Denmark). We’ll teach researchers from diverse fields how to fit state-space models via maximum likelihood estimation using the Laplace approximation to integrate out latent variables and automatic differentiation to calculate gradients. This is much faster than Bayesian methods.

These methods are implemented in AD Model Builder and a new R package called TMB. Currently, the course organizers are trying to decide if we should teach both, or only TMB. There are costs and benefits to being early adopters of new software. For example, several years ago, when the user base of ADMB was expanding beyond fisheries stock assessment, we found several bugs that weren’t exposed until people started trying different types of models and different computational platforms. We don’t want to expose students to these issues. On the other hand, learning one new program (rather than two) in a three day workshop might be preferable for some participants. Plus, most ecologists already use R, so learning the package TMB might be slightly easier for them than learning to use ADMB through the R2admb interface. TMB is more streamlined than ADMB because it had ADMB as an example and took advantage of existing free and open source C++ libraries. Whatever we decide to do, we’ll make sure the class exercises and examples are fully debugged before the workshop. Maybe I’ll use my lab mates’ computers as Guinea pigs.

The course will take place September 1-3, followed by 2 days of developing the TMB package and applications. We still have some openings for participants. Applications are due August 1.

More information can be found at the course website

https://sites.google.com/site/uzhstatespaceworkshop/

The workshop is funded by a GRC Grant from the University of Zurich.