Animove Summer school

By Moses Duguru

The Animove summer school 2013 which took place at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithologie in the little village of Mggengen attracted 30 participants from all over the world with a wide variety of experiences and projects related to animal movement which include Homerange shifts in meerkats in Africa. The relative importance of landscape parameters in African Elephant (Loxodonta africana) Movement decisions and home range Movements of the Betpak-Dala population of Saiga antelopes (Saiga tatarica) in Central Kazakhstan. etc

The summer school kicked off with a remarkable talk on motives and significance of animal movement by Prof Carl Beierkuhnlein(Global Change Ecology) which was followed by the ice breaker event to enable participants get to know each other. The week was packed with important topics which cut across the fields of computational ecology ,land cover and species distribution analysis to modeling of animal movement such as; Practical tracking of animals and field measurements using radio trackers Spatial data analysis and Remote sensing data in R. Home range selection in R Movement data visualisation movement analyses. Methods and approaches to combine animal movement with remote sensing data for conservation. New packages for movement analysis . Also some special topics based on the needs and projects of the participants.

There was time during the weekend for quality hiking, canoeing. Participants had an opportunity to fly with the director of the MPI Prof. Dr Martin Wikelski for bird tracking with the aid of plane mounted radio and GPS tracking system .

Evening talks where giving by several renowned ecologist among which are; Johannes Stahl, UNEP/CMS Secretariat Prof Jonathan Baillie ZSL new technologies for nature Prof. Dr Martin Wikelski MPI progress in movement ecology Dr. Peter Leimgruber Smithsonian conservation in Mongolia Patrick Laube university of Zurich on Geographical information science Christian Ziegler photographer National Geographic Thomas Brooks IUCN science Nicolas Perony university of Zurich