Migration ecology
Migration ecology
What is migration ecology?
Migration ecology focuses on the scientific study of animal migration. Important research questions concern the genetic basis of the migratory syndrome, what specific skills animals require for migration, how proximte and ultimate mechanisms alter the spatial and temporal distribution and abundance of migrating animals within the annual cycle, the interactions between animals and their biotic and abiotic environment, and how migrating animals influence energy and material cycles within and between ecosystems.
News
05.03.2026 - New member of the team
Alice Scalzo joined our team as a new PhD student at the beginning of March. Over the next three years, she will be investigating the significance of pre-migratory flights and the effects of pesticides on the migration of songbirds. We look forward to working with her!
03.03.2026 - New Publication on R-package 'movetrack'
In this publication, we provide a userfriendly R-package, that reconstructs flight path from Radiotelemetry data, as derived for example by the Motus Wildlife Tracking System. We validated this approach by two testflights with a light aircraft in the Motus-Network in the German Bight.
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041-210x.70273?af=R
29.01.2026 - A new team member
A warm welcome to Matteo Guidotti who joined our lab now as an SFB fellow. In the next 10 months, he will work closely together with Annika Peter on the orientation in free-flying Northern Wheatears on Helgoland.
15.01.2026 - New Logo for our research Group
In order to create a recognisable symbol for our Migration Ecology research group (abbreviated to ‘MigEcol’), we have jointly developed a representative logo. It shows a Northern Wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe) in flight, a bird species that has been central to our research for decades. In the background, you can see a globe made up of a network of dots and lines. This symbolises global bird migration, the main research topic of the working group, with the dots representing Stopover sites and the lines representing flight paths.
We would like to express our special thanks to Jan Ulber and Alexandra Frost for their support in design.
Current research priorities
We are an important part of the following cooperative research areas:
Magnetoreception and navigation in vertebrates: from biophysics to brain and behaviour
The central goal of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB)/Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1372 is to gain a comprehensive and multidisciplinary understanding of magnetoreception and navigation in vertebrates, from the biophysical mechanisms to the natural behaviour of navigating animals, taking into account all intermediate steps.
Excellent Research on Animal Navigation
The scientific mission of the Cluster of Excellence proposal NaviSense is to provide a thorough, interdisciplinary understanding of the mechanisms used by animals to navigate, and how these mechanisms can inspire technology and impact society, ecology, and biodiversity.
