Movement is an important function of organisms, which has an impact on lives of individuals, populations, interactions between species and with humans, as well as on ecosystem processes. Ecologists collect data on animal movement through multiple approaches, including photo-identification.

In this project, the successful applicant will study movements of bottlenose dolphins using a spatio-temporal networks approach from human mobility research. Specifically, the project will use long-term photo-identification data to build origin-destination (OD) flow networks, which are common in studies of different types of human mobility, but they are not well-known in movement ecology. Here, we will investigate how spatio-temporal network analysis can be applied to the study of marine mammal movement, using a well-studied population of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in the northern Adriatic Sea as a case study.