A tiny overview of my current research.
Like a Sports Watch for Animals
I’ve told my mum to tell her friends I build sports watches for wild animals. While not entirely true — for one, it’s generally a collar, not a watch — in most cases, this answer is close enough. Similar to your trusty FitBit or Garmin or AppleWatch, I use collars to track animal sleep and steps, activities, energy expenditure, and even try to estimate stress (“Being chased by a lion delayed your recovery! Try taking it easy tomorrow.”). Unlike human sports watches, however, animal data can be used for more than just humble-bragging on Strava. A full activity history, integrated with dead-reckoned exact movement paths (like high-resolution GPS but exactly accurate to every step), can be used to develop detailed maps with behaviour and movement across space and time for each collared animal. We can see where they slept, for how long, which trees they climbed, and whether they fed there, the distance they travelled, and at what speed they went; as well as every other little thing they did. In a time of increasing biodiversity loss due to land clearing, urbanisation, and dwindling natural resources, there is an increasing need for high-resolution technologies to understand and embed individuals within the context of their local, as well as regional and ecosystem-level, environment. Biologging collars, a kind of sports watch for animals, enables us to do this.
My current interest is in making complex things simple. My PhD research focuses on how to best simplify and standardised the machine learning and programming pipeline for behavioural detection and exact-path reconstruction from wild-animal-borne biologging collars. While most of my publications are methods focused, I am also interested in using this technology to ask new and exciting ecological questions. In my side-projects, I have lead and collaborated on a number of applied-ecology projects to ask interesting questions such as:
- How do anti-predation bibs affect domestic cat behaviour?
- When do koalas walk on the ground at night?
- Are impala afraid of predators?
- Do kangaroos cross the road (or fences)?
See my publications for more about these projects!