Team
Silke Bauer | Project coordinator / WP 5 leader
Animal migrations, especially their large scale patterns and timing are Silke’s core research interest. Although much of her research has been devoted to migrants and migrations themselves, it increasingly also recognizes that migrants can have a multitude of effects and interact with the resident communities visited during their journeys. Silke is a researcher at the Federal Research Institute (WSL).
Thibault Desert
Thibault is a physics engineer working on atmospheric measurement systems. He joined Météo-France in February 2022 to work on the detection and quantification of migration with meteorological radars.
Peter Desmet | WP 1 leader
Peter is passionate about open data and open science. He works as open data coordinator for the Open science lab for biodiversity at the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO).
Andrew Farnsworth
Andrew is a visiting scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, having led or guided the BirdCast project since 1999. He studies bird migration, bird distribution, and their relationships to meteorological, climatological, and anthropogenic factors, as well as leading philanthropic efforts to promote biodiversity and land conservation.
Birgen Haest | WP 4 leader
Birgen is a computational ecologist studying animal migration. As a research associate at the Swiss Ornithological Institute, he uses radar to quantify the migratory movements of insects, bats, and birds, and understand the drivers thereof.
Will Hawkes
Will is an insect migration scientist based at the Swiss Ornithological Institute. His research involves using ground level trapping and radar techniques to investigate insect migration. He is fascinated by the life histories and identities of the insects, and loves telling the stories of these most remarkable of migrants.
Bart Hoekstra
Bart is a bird migration watcher turned radar ecologist. He uses weather radars to forecast and map large-scale movements of migratory birds, in support of nature-inclusive wind energy. Bart is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam.
Pieter Huybrechts
Pieter is a research software engineer and data scientist affiliated with the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO). He employs his expertise in R programming and data analysis in contributing to serveral open source software packages.
Dominik Kleger
Dominik is currently CEO of Swiss Birdradar Solution (2024). He has a background in electrical engineering and digital signal processing and has been working with radar technology for many years.
Eva Knop
Eva studies the ecological consequences of global land-use and climate change, with a particular focus on insects. On the one hand, she is interested in the large-scale spatio-temporal patterns and processes of those changes within and across ecosystems. On the other hand, on a smaller scale she studies the underlying mechanisms of the changes in an experimental way. Eva Knop is based at Agroscope and associated with the University of Zürich.
Bart Kranstauber | WP 2 leader
Bart is a computational ecologist interested in space use and movement, in recent years he has used radars to study movement patterns in air space and developed predictive models for bird migration. Currently Bart is based at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics of the University of Amsterdam.
Felix Liechti
Felix is an ecologist with broad interests, but a particular focus on bird migration. He has been fascinated for more than 30 years in using modern technology like radar and miniaturized data-loggers to investigate animal movements that are otherwise invisible. Felix led the Bird Migration Department at the Swiss Ornithological Institute, and has after retirement joined the private company Swiss Birdradar Solutions AG. His focus has now extended to insect migration.
Isabel Metz
Isabel has been investigating means to involve air traffic control in wildlife hazard management by providing them with real-time and predicted wildlife movement information based on radar data since 2015. She is a research associate at the German Aerospace Center’s Institute of Flight Guidance where she heads the Air Traffic Control Tower simulation facilities.
Cecilia Nilsson
Cecilia is a behavioral ecologist, working with bird monitoring, flight behviour and radar ornithology. She currently works at Lund University, where she studies large scale patterns of bird migration using data from networks of weather radars.
Benjamin Rutschmann
Benjamin is an entomologist based at Agroscope, where he uses small-scale radars to unravel the links between insect biomass, activity, and land use intensity. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Würzburg, specializing in the ecology of honeybees, particularly those living in the wild. His current work at Agroscope is dedicated to understanding how environmental factors shape the diverse populations of insects, aiming to shed light on these vital yet often overlooked contributors to our ecosystems.
Judy Shamoun-Baranes | WP 5 leader
Judy is an ecologist fascinated by animal movement and especially avian flight. Her research aims at understanding how intrinsic and external factors influence animal movement and the short and long term consequences of movement strategies. Judy is a professor at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam.
Hans van Gasteren
Hans is an wildlife ecologist for more than 35 years at the Royal Netherlands Air Force. Working on the edge of nature conservataion and military operations. Particular interested in bird migration research by radar all to understand bird migration ecology, local bird movements around airports with respect to flight safety issues and prediction of bird migration movements.
Nadja Weisshaupt | WP 3 leader
Nadja’s main research interests are bird migration and conservation. She has used a wide range of bird monitoring data and techniques, including various remote sensing tools. She works as a radar ornithologist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute developing aeroecological methodologies and services for various user groups.