As a movement ecologist, I am interested in the ways in which animals interact with their environment to determine when and where they move. My current research focuses on mechanisms of individual and population bird movement in a changing environment. I study the Bewick’s swan, a large waterbird that migrates annually between breeding grounds on the coastal Russian tundra and wintering grounds in the North Sea countries. During the last decades, the population’s wintering distribution has shifted more than 350 kilometers in northeastern direction, possibly as a response to rising global temperatures. Using GPS tracking, field observations and various modelling techniques, I examine which individual movement strategies within and between wintering and migration sites underlie this population shift. If we understand why individual swans make the spatiotemporal decisions they do, we can gain better insight in the shifts we observe on the population level.
