Dr. Odd Jacobson

I am a behavioral ecologist studying how animals modify their behavior in response to ecological and social change, and how these responses relate to life-history strategies, fitness, and evolutionary processes. My research focuses particularly on movement and space use as mechanisms through which environmental and demographic change shape the social and spatial organization of wild populations. I combine long-term observations of wild primates with demographic, climatic, and remotely sensed environmental data, using causal inference and Bayesian hierarchical modelling to study processes that unfold from daily behavioral decisions to multi-decadal change.

My work spans long-term primate field studies across tropical Asia and the Americas, from highly seasonal dry forests to lowland rainforests and peat-swamp systems. In white-faced capuchins at the Lomas Barbudal Monkey Project, I examine how climatic variability and intergroup competition shape spatial partitioning and social trade-offs. I am also investigating whether and how dispersing male capuchins transfer spatial information about the local environment between groups through social learning. My research on Bornean orangutans at Tuanan Research Station shows how mothers in a largely solitary species modify their movements to meet offspring social needs at a cost to their own energy budgets. I am extending these approaches comparatively to the sympatric primate community at Ketambe, including Sumatran orangutans, long-tailed macaques, Thomas’s leaf monkeys, white-handed gibbons, and siamangs, to test how life history, social organization, and ecological context shape movement strategies and responses to environmental change.

In parallel, I develop methods to recover behavioral and movement information preserved in decades of field notes and hand-drawn maps. By converting these vulnerable archives into standardized and reusable datasets, I aim to safeguard their scientific value, reconstruct past behavioral responses to climatic variability, and strengthen our ability to predict responses to future climate change.