“Thanks to these collaborations, we have been able to do things that have never been done before; we have broken new ground”, she says.
Susanne Åkesson refers, among other things, to the opportunity provided by nanotechnology to mark and monitor extremely small animals. She also refers to the collaboration with Lund Laser Centre, where laser technology has helped biology students to study insects and birds in a new way, producing valuable data.
“We have arranged many workshops, which has been very important for us. They have generated new ideas and initiatives”, says Susanne Åkesson.
In CAnMove, there is a constant ambition to make new contacts on the engineering side of things, says Professor Åkesson. To give a recent example, she mentions the new investment in a mobile observatory, LUMBO, which will identify flying insects and night-flying birds. In this project, they are assisted by a number of Master’s students, both in physics and in signal processing and automatic control at LTH, who are helping to develop some parts of the equipment.
Four years ago, CAnMove appointed two technicians and invested in its own technical lab (see related article), and Susanne Åkesson sees great value in this. She explains that it has created new opportunities in research and points out that innovation requires technical expertise.
"The technology often sets the limits of what researchers can do. Without technical assistance, you can’t realise ideas you want to test”, she says.
Susanne Åkesson observes that a large research programme is needed to be able to offer long-term employment to technicians. An investment of this type cannot be made on individual research budgets, she says.
In CAnMove, they have also invested in other specialist expertise. A full-time database developer has recently been appointed and for nearly four years they have had a bioinformation specialist employed at a rate of 25 per cent to carry out analysis of DNA sequences as part of the genetic connection to animal migration patterns.
“I’m also pleased with our investment in light logging (see box), which has produced great research results. We learn a lot about bird species that we haven’t known all that much about before”, she says.
As the icing on the cake, CAnMove’s researchers are in the process of writing a weighty book – an overview of their entire research field, entitled Animal Movements Across Scales. The book will be published by Oxford University Press next year.
Lena Björk Blixt
