Events at the MPIAB

Little is known about the spatial use and migration behavior of European Honey Buzzards (Pernis apivorus) in Germany. Looking at tagging projects in Germany, covering this subject, only one could be found in which German Honey Buzzards were tagged in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany from 2001 to 2011 by Meyburg et al. (2013). The Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior started a tagging project on this topic in 2019.In this work, the data is analyzed for the first time with a special focus on the wintering areas. The distribution of habitats, their size, the daily distance of the forays, land cover, temperature and precipitation will be analyzed and compared with the situation in the breeding areas.Between 2019 and 2023, the Max Planck Institute was able to tag eleven Honey Buzzards with GPS transmitters. The data were uploaded into Movebank, an open-source platform for processing animal-related data. The statistical calculations were done to these data. Using the Environmental Automated Track Annotation (Env-DATA) system, the data could be assigned to environmental data and land cover, temperature and precipitation wer analyzed.The results showed that wintering areas in West and Central Africa differ from the breeding areas in terms of their distribution, size, number and land cover. Similar to the site fidelity during the breeding season, it was observed that Honey Buzzards return to wintering sites from previous years.The results provide initial insights into the characteristics of wintering areas going beyond cartographic localization. Regarding the still small data set, the results only provide an initial insight into the behavior of German Honey Buzzards. [more]

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There is clear and growing evidence that anthropogenic impacts on our environment are impacting our quality of life. Spillovers of zoonotic diseases occur more frequently in degraded landscapes where contact between humans and wildlife increase. Restoration has been flagged as a key tool in our quest to redress some of the damage that has been done historically but there is very little known about how restoration may protect against spillover risk. In addition, how mechanisms that link to spillover risk may play out in restoring landscapes has rarely been tested and given that human interaction with restored landscapes is likely to remain high or increase because of the restoration, this may represent a risky environment for spillover. In this talk I will touch on some of the previous work carried out investigating transmission dynamics in a wild rodent at the individual and population level and discuss a little bit about how we intend to extend this work in RESTOREID using a range of novel technological approaches, with the belief that leveraging innovations in other disciplines can be an incredibly powerful tool for ecological research. [more]