Yann Tremblay | Simon Benhamou | Marie-Pierre Etienne | Rocío Joo
The four invited researchers have complementary skills, from theoretical to practical, and teaching to researching. Their collective expertize is wide-ranging, they can provide excellent guidance, advice and insights to all participants at the workshop, regardless of the species they are working on and the particular research question they are asking. More specifically, these experts have experience in the movement ecology of a variety of animal taxa, including terrestrial species (rodents, carnivores, cervidae, bovidae, insects) and marine species (invertebrates, seabirds, seals, turtles, fish, fishermen/fisheries). The analyses they have undertaken use a large range of methodologies and cover all aspects of movement ecology: from identifying movement patterns and describing habitat use, through predicting behavioural states, to understanding the mechanisms driving movement. Altogether, these experts perfectly match the challenge identified for the movement ecology paradigm: "we need to identify phases of specific activity modes in observed movement paths ... and reveal the underlying mechanisms from their statistical properties." (Nathan 2008 PNAS).
Yann Tremblay
Yann Tremblay's research activities focus on behavioural adaptations of marine top predators to their physical and biological environment. He aims to understand the processes leading to specific behavioural foraging strategies. Yann has been using various tracking technologies (Argos, GPS, GLS, TDR, video cameras) and developed numerous tools to study the movements and behaviours of diverse marine predators species (from seabirds to mammals). He is a full time researcher at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), UMR Exploited Marine Ecosystems, currently working at the Instituto del Mar del Perú (IMARPE) in Lima (Peru).
Simon Benhamou
Simon Benhamou has studied the movement ecology and behaviour of a variety of vertebrate species in both the terrestrial and marine environments. His work focuses on understanding animal movement in terms of foraging strategies, habitat selection and navigation. For this purpose he has been involved in developing different modelling tools for analysing path structure and space use, such as BRB/MKDE (Biased Random Bridges for Movement-based kernel density estimation) for computing distributions of space use, path recursions (visit number) and intensity per visit within a home range. Simon is currently a CNRS researcher at the Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive (CEFE) in Montpellier (France).
Marie-Pierre Etienne
Marie-Pierre Etienne is a statistician interested in developing tools for analysing ecological systems, particularly focusing on marine ecology. Her particular interests are in Hierarchical and State-Space Modelling, and creating new methods for analysing animal movement trajectories. She is an Associate Professor at AgroParisTech, UMR Mathématiques et Informatique Appliquées (MIA), Team MOdelling and Risk in Environmental Statistics (MORSE), in Paris (France), and a member of the Etat J'erre group funded by the EUR'OCEANS consortium.
Rocío Joo
After completing an MSc in biostatistics, Rocío Joo conducted research on the spatial behaviour of fishermen during her PhD. She studied their movements at sea (from VMS data) and used various statistical and modelling approaches to characterize their behavioural states and patterns at different scales. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Instituto del Mar del Perú (IMARPE) in Lima (Peru) and is a member of the Etat J'erre group funded by the EUR'OCEANS consortium.