Flight Analysis of Black-Backed Seagulls (2012)

Undergraduate: Salem Elrahal

Faculty Advisor: Jack Snoeyink
Department: Computer Science

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Advances in miniature electronics have increased the amount and type of data that can be gathered to track animal migrations and behavior. Using the example of gull data from the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, we explore questions not only of where the birds are, but also of what they are doing from samples of their position, velocity, and acceleration. Constraints of power and memory impose restrictions on sampling, so we are interested in determining from richer data sets what behaviors can be reliably identified in sparser data sets – e.g., can we still determine if a bird is flapping its wings or soaring without having acceleration measurements?