Cecilia Nilsson

Another massive movement of migratory birds underway tonight — nearly 1 Billion Birds! With the full moon, you might be able to see some silhouettes zipping by. You can make your own flow maps here (just hit record): aeroecolab.com/uslights

Looking forward to sharing some of my PhD research on process-guided deep learning for bird migration in the AI for Good webinar series tomorrow! 🐦‍⬛🌍🤖

High above us, the atmosphere is teeming with life. New research from @cnilsson.science at Lund University reveals how the atmosphere is an ecosystem, with complex ecological processes that affect how animals move between different altitude levels of the airspace.
www.biology.lu.se/article/hidd...

Only a few days to go… please share!!!

We are seeking an ornithologist/modeller for a 2-year POST-DOC in Turin. Using archaeological remains, we will reconstruct past avian communities to understand the impacts of climate change and human pressure on birds through time. For details see cutt.ly/irN76QDZ PLEASE RT. #ornithology #AviArch

We're really proud and exited to announce that Staffan Bensch, professor at the Department of Biology, has received an ERC Advanced Grant for his project “Genetics of long-distance migration”. 👏👏👏

Read the full story on our website!
www.biology.lu.se/article/staf...

This is definitely one of those papers that goes in the, 'hm, I never really thought of it that way' category. I love these 'simple' but somehow mind shifting papers. And it's probably more relevant to my own niches than I had previously considered. Cool!

Animal niches in the airspace For flying animals, including many birds, bats, and insects, the air is a crucial arena for a range of behaviors. Technological advances, such as year-round tracking of flight altitudes and expanded use of radar, increasingly show how flying animals use the aerial habitat. This enables us to answer questions about the environmental patterns and ecological processes that shape aerial niches, including energetics, biotic interactions, and risk due to growing anthropogenic conflicts. In this review, we identify environmental conditions and biological interactions influencing where animals occur in the airspace throughout their life cycles. We outline an ecological framework to advance understanding of how different properties of the airspace shape fundamental aerial habitat niches and how biotic interactions influence the realized niches.

Online now: Animal niches in the airspace

Had so much fun writing this with Emily @emlbcohen.bsky.social, Judy @judyshamounb.bsky.social, Sissel @sisselsjoberg.bsky.social and Dara!

Animal niches in the airspace For flying animals, including many birds, bats, and insects, the air is a crucial arena for a range of behaviors. Technological advances, such as year-round tracking of flight altitudes and expanded u...

Are animals randomly distributed in the air, or is there a structure to where and when we find them? In our new paper we outline factors that shape habitat use in the air, from abiotic structure to biotic interactions. A lot of fun discussions behind this one! 🦅🦋🦇🌬
www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Migratory birds aren’t equally efficient at all speeds. A new Lund University study shows thrush nightingales fly most efficiently at 7–8 m/s – the speed they actually use on migration.
@pablomaciastorres.bsky.social & Prof. Anders Hedenström, Animal Flight Lab.

www.biology.lu.se/article/not-...

Join us in the migration ecology group at the University of Oldenburg! 📡🐦🐥

Energy conversion efficiency peaks at intermediate flight speed in a migratory songbird Using in vivo measurements of thrush nightingales flying in a wind tunnel, Macias-Torres et al. show that energy conversion efficiency varies with airspeed following a concave function, with a maximum...

After a lot of time spent in the darkness of the wind tunnel, the results finally see the light.
I'm very excited to share what will become the first chapter of my thesis.
Energy conversion efficiency peaks at intermediate flight speed in a migratory songbird www.cell.com/current-biol...

Post-doctoral fellow in functional genomics and ecophysiology Subject description The goal of the project is to uncover the mechanisms explaining why global warming and heatwaves reduce reproductive success and cause excess mortality in wild and domesticated war

I am looking for a postdoc wanting to use functional genomics to understand why birds 🐦 struggle with climate warming in @erc.europa.eu project #HotLife. Ideal candidate is a molecular evolutionarybiologist. Join us at @biologylu.bsky.social. Details 👇
shorturl.at/wijEq

Would appreciate a re-post!

Vacancy — Postdoc Brent Goose Demographic Analysis in Waakvogels (Sentinel Birds) Project Do you like working with large datasets? Always wanted to develop sophisticated population models? The department of Theoretical and Computational Ecology is looking for a postdoctoral researcher to s...

Do you like working with large datasets? Always wanted to develop sophisticated population models? I am looking for a postdoctoral researcher to study the impact of body weight on the survival and reproduction of dark-bellied brent goose using a long-term dataset.
werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Our PhD level course Ecology of Animal Migration at @biologylu.bsky.social is now open for applications! The course will run this November (3-14th) and cover various theoretical and practical aspects of migration ecology.

See: www.biology.lu.se/phd-studies/...

Another birding paper! 🐦Where do the Nearctic landbirds that show up in Europe each autumn come from? We usually assume they come from NE populations, pushed off course by bad weather - but is that the whole story? #ornithology 1/3

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/ We are delighted to have @judyshamounb.bsky.social deliver the Alfred Newton Lecture at #BOU2025 Frontiers in Ornithology

Judy's research focuses on understanding movement ecology in birds 🧵

#ornithology #migrationresearch #movementecology 🪶🧪

Rapid butterfly declines across the United States during the 21st century Numerous declines have been documented across insect groups, and the potential consequences of insect losses are dire. Butterflies are the most surveyed insect taxa, yet analyses have been limited in ...

Our paper is out, and it is distressing.

Rapid butterfly declines across the United States during the 21st century | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Biological data derived from European weather radars - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Biological data derived from European weather radars

And the paper can be found here:
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

@peterdesmet.com @baptischmi.bsky.social @barthoekstra.bsky.social @stijnvanhoey.be @inbo.be @biologylu.bsky.social @uva.nl @cornellbirds.bsky.social @vogelwarte.bsky.social @wslresearch.bsky.social
@biodiversaplus.bsky.social

European data on animals aloft now publicly available Weather radars detect more than weather, they also continuously register the movements of billions of animals (birds, bats, insects) in the air. Those data are now publicly available for large parts o...

Weather radars continuously register the movements of billions of animals in the air! We have now published datasets covering large parts of Europe, providing an overview of the aerial habitat in a way no other method can.

Data is available on Alofdata.eu , see our blogpost:
go.nature.com/3F0wQ0L

📢 APPLICATIONS OPEN...

...for the BOU Gibbs Award 2025

Funding #ornithology research on tracking and migration studies including the use of new technologies

bou.org.uk/funding/b...

Application deadline: 15 May 2025 🪶

Guest Post – Radar vs. Reality: Ground-Truthing NEXRAD Estimates of Migrating Birds Every birder I know has been influenced by the integration of radar into ornithology.

There's a new guest post on the WOS blog! WOS Research Award recipient @mikkojimenez.bsky.social writes about his efforts to ground-truth radar #ornithology data in Colorado.

Deadline for applications is now just over 2 weeks away. Please circulate widely

Fig. 1 from the article: Departure moments of blackbirds on Vlieland were associated with positive tailwinds, low cloud cover scores, and low scaled mass indices at arrival. In panel (a), horizontal lines represent the time each individual spent on the stopover location since the moment of first capture (open plotting symbols) until the moment of departure (vertical end line). In panel (b), cloud cover at sunrise or the moment of an individual's departure are plotted over date.

Fig. 2 from the article: Minimal adequate model fits with (dotted blue line), and without (solid red line) a random intercept for the day of tagging, with corresponding 95% confidence intervals (shaded blue and red areas, respectively). Lines show the ratio between the risk of departure, relative to an individual with all other covariates set at the sample's mean, for (a) scaled mass index, (b) haptoglobin level (the residual concentration over pre-scan absorbance at 450 nm)

Fig. 2 from the article: Minimal adequate model fits with (dotted blue line), and without (solid red line) a random intercept for the day of tagging, with corresponding 95% confidence intervals (shaded blue and red areas, respectively). Lines show the ratio between the risk of departure, relative to an individual with all other covariates set at the sample's mean, for (c) tailwind component, and (d) cloud cover score.

NEW PAPER: determinants of stopover duration in migratory blackbirds: lean birds extend stopovers, immune status has a weak effect. Weather conditions (cloud cover, tailwinds) are more influential.

➡️ https://vist.ly/3mtjme6

#ornithology #migration #ecoimmunology #birds
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PhD student in Evolution of Indo-Pacific birds The Department of Bioinformatics and Genetics is offering a four-year PhD position focused on analyzing population-level genomic data from museum bird samples. The project will employ cutting-edge gen...

[please share widely!]

We have two PhD positions available at the Swedish Museum of Natural History:

[Position 1] Birds, hybridization, genomes, island biology, biogeography, sexual selection 🦚, w/ me, Knud Jønsson, Martin Iredstedt and @stelkens.bsky.social et al
recruit.visma.com/spa/public/a...

Release petridish 3.1 · peterdesmet/petridish Homepage Breaking! The Twitter feed (tweets_on_home: true) is no longer supported. This functionality no longer worked with the change from Twitter to X. With the removal of the Twitter feed, the ...

I released a new version of ✨Petridish✨, the free Jekyll theme for research project websites. 🧫

It removes the Twitter feed from the homepage, allows you to add Bluesky and LinkedIn to socials and uses the latest version of Font Awesome. For all updates, see github.com/peterdesmet/...

How I built Geolocator DP using open source code New standard and software for geolocator data was inspired by tools developed by the Open science lab of biodiversity.

We create #opensource code, but what is its impact?

Luckily, Raphaël Nussbaumer wrote a blog post describing how he used our software to build a data standard for #geolocator data: oscibio.inbo.be/blog/geoloca... Couldn't be more proud! 🥹

Come do some exciting migratory insect and bird research with us! - Two more weeks until application deadline.
#entomology #radar #ornithology #phenology #ecology

8th Jan -deadline for fully funded PhD project examining individual variability in movement strategies of birds using tracking data. Please retweet.