Excited to share a new paper doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

We suggest that tradeoffs between infection costs and the benefits of sociality are dynamic, context-dependent, and likely asymmetric within dyads. We then propose hypotheses about how these tradeoffs might shape social responses to parasites...

Happy to see our paper featured on the cover of the Journal of Applied Ecology!! @jappliedecology.bsky.social @britishecologicalsociety.org

Thanks, Habib Ali Hamid - @saharaconservation.bsky.social for the beautiful image of scimitar-horned oryx (Oryx dammah) reintroduced in Chad.

For decades biologists assumed ravens follow wolves to their kills.
Our paper @science.org shows something different: ravens rarely follow wolves far. Instead they remember areas where wolf kills are common and return to them—sometimes from >150 km away.
doi.org/10.1126/science.adz9467
📷Dan Stahler

Ravens anticipate wolf kill sites across broad scales Scavengers generally rely on patchily distributed, unpredictable carrion. A long-standing hypothesis suggests scavenging ravens reliably locate such food by directly following large carnivores to thei...

You know those people who magically appear whenever there’s free food? Ravens do that too – but in Yellowstone, it’s not luck and not because they trail wolves. Instead, they remember where and when kills happen, navigating a mental map of the “landscape of death". www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Huge thanks to my co-authors @theomichelot.bsky.social, Katherine Mertes, Jared A. Stabach — and my PhD advisor John Fieberg 🙌

#AnimalTelemetry #DiseaseEcology #MovementEcology #WildlifeDisease #Reintroduction

By integrating movement ecology and disease ecology, this framework supports more proactive, data-driven conservation strategies.

Why does this matter?

Detecting infection before mortality provides an early-warning tool for wildlife managers, reduces reliance on costly field testing, and strengthens surveillance for vulnerable and reintroduced populations.

We compared several model formulations:

• Constraining transitions to preclude or allow recovery
• Adding ecological covariates to test drivers of infection risk
• Using hierarchical HMMs (HHMMs) to separate short- and long-term movement responses

Infection status is treated as a hidden state, while movement metrics (step lengths, turning angles) are state-dependent observations.

This mirrors compartmental models (e.g., Susceptible–Infected–Recovered, SIR), formally connecting movement to disease progression.

We developed a framework linking animal movement to disease processes using HMMs, applied to GPS data from 84 reintroduced scimitar-horned oryx (Oryx dammah) in Chad.

Detecting disease progression from animal movement using hidden Markov models We demonstrate how (H)HMMs can be tailored to different epidemiological scenarios and provide a template workflow for developing and selecting Hidden Markov models to infer disease status from animal...

Published in @jappliedecology.bsky.social!😀

We show how (Hierarchical) Hidden Markov Models ((H)HMMs) can be tailored to different epidemiological scenarios to infer disease status directly from animal movement data.

🔗 ttps://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.70323

Movebank

Help us improve Movebank: During 2026, we will undertake a major renewal of the Movebank system to build scalability and sustainability. What does Movebank mean for you? How could it better support your work? Your feedback will be highly appreciated! Survey: survey.academiccloud.de/f/221856?lan...

Contract Opportunity: MoveApps Developer (Survival Analysis)
Y2Y.net team are seeking a developer to design, implement, and deploy an survival analysis within the MoveApps platform (Movebank). This role focuses on implementing survival analysis methods using R implemented on MoveApps.

Big thanks to all the contributors (Sarah Davidson, Francesca Cagnacci, Claire Teitelbum, Collin Schwantes, Marta Valldeperes Falgueras, and Will Rogers)!

MDA aims to:
• link biologging with diagnostic data
• support early-warning wildlife health monitoring
• enable FAIR long-term data stewardship
• build collaboration across movement & disease ecology

🌍 Excited to share the Move Disease Archive (MDA)—co-led by me and @kmorelle.bsky.social with support from Movebank, Move BON, Euromammals, and many partners!

A global collection of wildlife movement + disease data to understand behavior, spread & spillover!
🔗 kimx3725.github.io/move-disease...

Figure with two panels. Left panel: visualisation of a 3D movement track. Right panel: visualisation of the 3D direction of movement as two angles (one horizontal angle and one vertical angle).

We have a preprint about modelling three-dimensional movement tracks, led by @njklappstein.bsky.social.

The model takes the form of a step selection function and, just like in 2D, it can include directional persistence, attraction to targets, and habitat selection.

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

This is my first postdoc project, and thanks to all the co-authors (Ellen Aikens, Teresa Pegan, and David Wolfson) for their contribution! Especially, very thankful for my co-advisors: Jesús Pinto-Ledezma and Paul Moorcroft for giving me the freedom to lead a project that I want to tackle :)

Understanding partial migration: linking genetic, developmental, and environmental drivers Partial migration, where some individuals in a population migrate while others remain resident, arises from the dynamic interplay of multiple non-exclusive eco-evolutionary mechanisms. These mechanism...

Preprint!
Ever wondered why individuals within the same species migrate differently? Or what drives some animals to become partial migrants? Then, this paper is for you!

Our new paper synthesizes the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that shape partial migration.
Link: doi.org/10.22541/au....

FERAL: A Video-Understanding System for Direct Video-to-Behavior Mapping Animal behavior unfolds continuously in time, yet quantitative analyses often require segmenting it into discrete, interpretable states. Although manual annotation can achieve this, it remains slow, s...

Our preprint is out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Peter Skovorodnikov and I are excited to present FERAL: a new video-understanding toolkit that maps raw video directly to behavior, no pose estimation required.
It works across species, from lab to field, and even in collective systems. (🧵1/n)

🦌 Deer migration, deer density, tick distribution and incidence of a tick-borne zoonosis
➡️ buff.ly/4wXYf5c

The next International Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC) will take place in Mérida, México, on January 8-15, 2027. Very exciting!

The organisers are inviting submissions for workshops and round table discussions: statisticalecology.org (Deadline: November 15th)

Graphic with the following text followed by The Institute for Bird Populations logo: Emergency Appeal: Federal Funding Cut Last week 9 of our federal grants were abruptly cancelled without cause. If you can make a donation today, it will have a big impact. Thank you for your support, The Institute for Bird Populations

🪶 If you are able, you donate here: birdpop.org/pages/do...
We lost roughly $1 million in funding without warning. Projects cancelled included all of our bird monitoring work for the National Park Service & projects w/ the Bureau of Land Management on Gunnison's Sage-Grouse, Pinyon Jays & more. 1/4

Thanks to:
- Théo Michelot for many discussions on applying HMMs to movement data.
- Jared Stabach and Katherine Mertes for helping identify movement datasets from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.
- My PhD advisor, John Fieberg, for guidance throughout this work.

Detecting disease progression from animal movement using hidden Markov models Understanding disease dynamics is crucial for managing wildlife populations and assessing spillover risk to domestic animals and humans, but infection data on free-ranging animals are difficult to obt...

🚨 New preprint!

Have you ever wondered if we can detect disease in wildlife just by looking at their movement?

We show how hidden Markov models can link animal trajectories to infection states — tested on reintroduced scimitar-horned oryx and simulated data.
👉 arxiv.org/abs/2509.21132

hmmTMB: Hidden Markov Models with Flexible Covariate Effects in R by Théo Michelot <p>Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are widely applied in studies where a discrete-valued process of interest is observed indirectly. They have for example been used to model behavior from human and animal...

The hmmTMB paper is finally out in the Journal of Statistical Software!

An R package for hidden Markov models with random effects, flexible spline-based covariate effects, and fast inference using TMB or Stan.

Check out the GIthub repository for more examples.

doi.org/10.18637/jss...

Perceived and observed biases within scientific communities: a case study in movement ecology

New paper out in @royalsocietypublishing.org, originally conceived at a Gordon Research Conference

👉 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

If there is an optimal behavior, why is there so much variation in the world? We found that, for white storks, context is everything. @anflack.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

New paper! @cellpress.bsky.social doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.06.044
🧵1/5

We're #hiring a Statistical Wildlife Ecologist! This position analyzes large, complex datasets to support landscape management throughout Canada.

Learn more and apply through the University of Alberta by May 27, 2025:

wildlifescience.ca/hiring-stati...

#biodiversity #mammals #wildlife

Animal Telemetry Postdoctoral Fellow Job Opening: Animal Telemetry Postdoctoral Fellow at Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, MD.

Animal telemetry postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, applications due 20 May: trustcareers.si.edu/postings/cd7...