Marina Papadopoulou

Swansea University | SWAN · Department of Biosciences

Moving in groups offers animals protection against predation. When under attack, grouped individuals often turn collectively to evade a predator, which sometimes makes them rapidly change their relative positions in the group. In bird flocks in particular, the quick reshuffling of flock members confuses the predator, challenging its targeting of a...

Most studies of collective animal behaviour rely on short-term observations, and comparisons of collective behaviour across different species and contexts are rare. We therefore have a limited understanding of intra- and interspecific variation in collective behaviour over time, which is crucial if we are to understand the ecological and evolutiona...

A single sheepdog can bring together and manoeuvre hundreds of sheep from one location to another. Engineers and ecologists are fascinated by this sheepdog herding because of the potential it provides for ‘bio‐herding’: a biologically inspired herding of animal groups by robots. Although many herding algorithms have been proposed, most are studied...

Complex patterns of collective behaviour may emerge through self-organization, from local interactions among individuals in a group. To understand what behavioural rules underlie these patterns, computational models are often necessary. These rules have not yet been systematically studied for bird flocks under predation. Here, we study airborne flo...

Bird flocks under predation demonstrate complex patterns of collective escape. These patterns may emerge by self-organization from local interactions among group-members. Computational models have been shown to be valuable for identifying what behavioral rules may govern such interactions among individuals during collective motion. However, our kno...

Bird flocks under predation demonstrate complex patterns of collective escape. These patterns may emerge by self-organization from simple interactions among group-members. Computational models have been shown to be valuable for identifying the behavioral rules that may govern these interactions among individuals during collective motion. However, o...

Sometimes the normal course of events is disrupted by a particularly swift and profound change. Historians have often referred to such changes as “revolutions”, and, though they have identified many of them, they have rarely supported their claims with statistical evidence. Here, we present a method to identify revolutions based on a measure of mul...

Conservation biology was founded on the idea that efforts to save nature depend on a scientific understanding of how it works. It sought to apply ecological principles to conservation problems. We investigated whether the relationship between these fields has changed over time through machine reading the full texts of 32,000 research articles publi...