About me

Tenure track

I’m a tenure track researcher at the Department of Ecoscience, Aarhus University in Denmark. At the department we focus on research and advisory work within the field of Biology. My focus is primarily on bats, an understudied order that plays a key role in Danish biodiversity. I work on developing tools to use passive acoustic monitoring and camera trap images in hibernacula to quantify activity patterns and make abundance estimates for several bat species. This includes developing data pipelines, training deep neural networks and adapting statistical models to deal with uncertainties in the data collection as well as all covariates influencing activity and abundance.

I have contributed to a number of advisory reports, in which we quantified bat activity above the Danish North Sea and piloted a camera trap system combined with a neural network to classify individuals entering a limestone mine in fall and leaving in spring. We are currently working on quantifying bat activity above all of the Danish offshore waters, a big project including passive acoustic data from multiple consultants, companies and agencies.

For the coming years, we received a grant from ÅV Jensen Nature Foundation to finish the development of the camera trap and neural network and monitor Mønsted Limestone Mines for three additional years. This is an amazing opportunity, which will give us the first continuous dataset of pond bat activity in their main hibernation location in Denmark and allow us to monitor this near-threatened species alongside four other species for years to come.

PhD

During my PhD, I was broadly interested in the evolution of complex cognition and culture. More specifically I focussed on the emergence of socially learned vocal behaviours in parrots. I studied vocalisations and social behaviour of the monk parakeet, an invasive parrot in many European cities. I also did comparative work trying to link vocal complexity, social complexity, brain size and longevity across parrots. I was supervised by Dr. Lucy Aplin and Dr. Mary Brooke McElreath.

Among othr things, my work showed a unique voice print for individuals and dialects across the European range of monk parakeets. For the latter we also published a video explaining the results to the general public.