CASUS Institute Seminar, Prof. Michael J. Noonan, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Kanada)
Habitat loss and fragmentation are the principal threats to biodiversity. Understanding how animals move across, and use their habitat is thus a key component for generating effective conservation strategies. Advancements in animal tracking technologies over the past several decades have put ecologists in a position to quantify animal movement in unprecedented detail.
Statistical techniques for analysing these new and challenging datasets, however, have been lagging behind. The result is that data generated from novel technologies are rarely used to their full potential. Worse, it is becoming increasingly clear that the application of inappropriate statistics to animal movement data has been leading to severely biased conclusions. From home range estimation to path reconstruction my work focuses on leveraging key features of animal tracking data to develop novel movement analysis tools and maximise the utility of these valuable data for species conservation and ecological theory alike.