Wolfgang FiedlerMax Planck Institute of Animal Behavior · Migration
Wolfgang Fiedler
PhD
About
180
Publications
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Introduction
Wolfgang Fiedler currently works at the Department of Migration at Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. Wolfgang does research on phenology and consequences of animal migration and is head of the Centre for Animal Marking for Southern Germany
Additional affiliations
January 1998 - December 2013
Education
February 1994 - December 1997
Max Planck Institute for Behavioural Physiology
Field of study
- Ornithology
October 1986 - December 1993
Publications
Publications (180)
Over the past five decades, a large number of wild animals have been individually identified by various observation systems and/or temporary tracking methods, providing unparalleled insights into their lives over both time and space. However, so far there is no comprehensive record of uniquely individually identified animals nor where their data an...
The heterogeneity of the physical environment determines the cost of transport for animals, shaping their energy landscape. Animals respond to this energy landscape by adjusting their distribution and movement to maximize gains and reduce costs. Much of our knowledge about energy landscape dynamics focuses on factors external to the animal, particu...
The heterogeneity of the physical environment determines the cost of transport for animals, shaping their energy landscape. Animals respond to this energy landscape by adjusting their distribution and movement to maximize gains and reduce movement costs. Much of our current knowledge about energy landscape dynamics focuses on factors external to th...
The heterogeneity of the physical environment determines the cost of transport for animals, shaping their energy landscape. Animals respond to this energy landscape by adjusting their distribution and movement to maximize gains and reduce movement costs. Much of our current knowledge about energy landscape dynamics focuses on factors external to th...
The heterogeneity of the physical environment determines the cost of transport for animals, shaping their energy landscape. Animals respond to this energy landscape by adjusting their distribution and movement to maximize gains and reduce movement costs. Much of our current knowledge about energy landscape dynamics focuses on factors external to th...
Some experiences of research in three nesting sites of Common Swift (Apus apus) in NW Italy. We studied breeding phenology and the effect of meteorological data; the use of a model of cork coaster as attractant; the tracking system based on SigFox IoT network.
Migration can be an energetically costly behavior with strong fitness consequences in terms of mortality and reproduction. Migrants should select migratory routes to minimize their costs, but both costs and benefits may change with experience. This raises the question of whether experience changes how individuals select their migratory routes. Here...
How animals refine migratory behavior over their lifetime (i.e., the ontogeny of migration) is an enduring question with important implications for predicting the adaptive capacity of migrants in a changing world. Yet, our inability to monitor the movements of individuals from early life onward has limited our understanding of the ontogeny of migra...
In this study, during 2017–2018, for the first time in Kosovo, research on the census, distribution and population dynamics of the White Stork was made. 61 new nests were found in the whole country territory and together with 22 known nests, the total population is recorded to 83 nests and 72 breeding pairs. In total, 461 chicks were raised in the...
Migration can be an energetically costly behavior with strong fitness consequences in terms of mortality and reproduction. The fact that costs and benefits may change with age and experience raises the question of whether experience changes the criteria that individuals use to select their migratory routes. Here we investigate the effect of age on...
The heterogeneity of the physical environment determines the cost of transport for animals, shaping their energy landscape. Animals respond to this energy landscape by adjusting their distribution and movement to maximize gains and reduce movement costs. Much of our current knowledge about energy landscape dynamics focuses on factors external to th...
The main goal of the LIFE EUROKITE project is to reduce anthropogenic causes of mortality of the red kite in Europe. The efficient protection of the red kite requires the detailed understanding of overall mortality reasons, especially focusing on those caused by legal and illegal human activities. The LIFE EUROKITE project focuses on a Europe-wide...
Coastal, and to a lesser extend inland wetlands, are critical habitats for wintering shorebirds. Given the significant population declines of most shorebird species worldwide, the current degradation of coastal habitats through climate change and human activities raises severe conservation concerns. In order to ensure sufficient and adequate habita...
Choosing the right migration timing is critical for migrants because conditions encountered en route influence movement costs, survival, and, in social migrants, the availability of social information. Depending on life-time stages, individuals may migrate at different times due to diverging constraints, affecting the composition of migration group...
Background
Connections between habitats are key to a full understanding of anthropic impacts on ecosystems. Freshwater habitats are especially biodiverse, yet depend on exchange with terrestrial habitats. White storks (Ciconia ciconia) are widespread opportunists that often forage in landfills and then visit wetlands, among other habitats. It is we...
Bio-telemetry from small tags attached to animals is one of the principal methods for studying the ecology and behaviour of wildlife. The field has constantly evolved over the last 80 years as technological improvement enabled a diversity of sensors to be integrated into the tags (e.g., GPS, accelerometers, etc.). However, retrieving data from tags...
Dispersal is a key life‐history trait for most species and is essential to ensure connectivity and gene flow between populations and facilitate population viability in variable environments. Despite the increasing importance of range shifts due to global change, dispersal has proved difficult to quantify, limiting empirical understanding of this ph...
Bio-telemetry from small tags attached to animals is one of the principal methods for studying the ecology and behaviour of wildlife. The eld has constantly evolved over the last 80 years as technological improvement enabled a diversity of sensors to be integrated into the tags (e.g., GPS, accelerometers, etc.). However, retrieving data from tags o...
Bird migrations are impressive behavioral phenomena, representing complex spatiotemporal strategies to balance costs of living while maximizing fitness. The field of bird migration research has made great strides over the past decades, yet fundamental gaps remain. Technologies have sparked a transformation in the study of bird migration research by...
Scatter-hoarding birds provide effective long-distance seed dispersal for plants. Transporting seeds far promotes population spread, colonization of new areas, and connectivity between populations. However, whether seeds transported over long distances are deposited in habitats favorable to plant regeneration has rarely been investigated, mainly du...
Migration patterns in birds vary in space and time. Spatial patterns include chain, leapfrog and telescopic migration. Temporal patterns such as migration duration, number, and duration of stopovers may vary according to breeding latitude, sex, and season. This study aimed to verify these patterns in a long‐distance migrant, the Eurasian curlew Num...
Wind turbines and power lines can cause bird mortality due to collision or electrocution. The biodiversity impacts of energy infrastructure (EI) can be minimised through effective landscape‐scale planning and mitigation. The identification of high‐vulnerability areas is urgently needed to assess potential cumulative impacts of EI while supporting t...
Space-based tracking technology using low-cost miniature tags is now delivering data on fine-scale animal movement at near-global scale. Linked with remotely sensed environmental data, this offers a biological lens on habitat integrity and connectivity for conservation and human health; a global network of animal sentinels of environmental change.
Quantifying movement and demographic events of free‐ranging animals is fundamental to studying their ecology, evolution and conservation. Technological advances have led to an explosion in sensor‐based methods for remotely observing these phenomena. This transition to big data creates new challenges for data management, analysis and collaboration....
Dispersal is a key life-history trait for most species and essential to ensure connectivity and gene flow between populations and facilitate population viability in variable environments. Despite the increasing importance of range shifts due to global change, dispersal has proved difficult to quantify, limiting empirical understanding of this pheno...
Animals continuously interact with their environment through behavioral decisions, rendering the appropriate choice of movement speed and directionality an important phenotypic trait. Anthropogenic activities may alter animal behavior, including movement. A detailed understanding of movement decisions is therefore of great relevance for science and...
Finding food is perhaps the most important task for all animals. Birds often show up unexpectedly at novel food sources such as freshly tilled fields or mown meadows. Here we test whether wild European white storks primarily use visual, social, auditory or olfactory information to find freshly cut farm pastures where insects and rodents abound. Aer...
Monitoring and early detection of emerging infectious diseases in wild animals is of crucial global importance, yet reliable ways to measure immune status and responses are lacking for animals in the wild. Here we assess the usefulness of bio-loggers for detecting disease outbreaks in free-living birds and confirm detailed responses using leukocyte...
Birds striking aircrafts cause substantial economic loss world‐wide and, more worryingly, human and wildlife fatalities. Designing effective measures to mitigate fatal bird strikes requires an in‐depth knowledge of the characteristics of this incident type and the flight behaviours of the bird species involved.
The characteristics of bird strikes i...
Das Kapitel behandelt das Vorkommen des Schreiadlers im Bundesland´Baden-Württemberg (Bundesrepublik Deutschland).
Seasonal geophysical cycles strongly influence the activity of life on Earth because they affect environmental conditions like temperature, precipitation and day length. An increase in daylight availability during summer is especially enhanced when animals migrate along a latitudinal gradient. Yet, the question of how day length (i.e. daylight avai...
Background
The use of tracking technologies is key for the study of animal movement and pivotal to ecological and conservation research. However, the potential effects of devices attached to animals are sometimes neglected. The impact of tagging not only rises welfare concerns, but can also bias the data collected, causing misinterpretation of the...
Impacts of wind turbines including the barrier effect can be site specific and may not occur at each site . Therefore, turbine layout and facility location should be evaluated on a site-specific basis by an experienced wildlife biologist in conjunction with available information regarding local and migratory bird and bat species in, around or passi...
Reliable estimates of nest‐switching are required to study avian mating systems and manage wild populations, yet different estimation methods have rarely been integrated or assessed. Through a literature review and case study, we reveal that three common methods for assessing nest‐switching blend different components, producing a wide range of esti...
The recent increase in wind energy facilities (WEF) has led to concerns about their effect on wildlife. While the focus of most studies has mainly been on increased mortality of birds and bats due to collision, indirect effects, such as behavioural responses, are currently gaining attention. Indeed, effects of WEF on the behaviour of forest dwellin...
Early-life conditions have critical, long-lasting effects on the fate of individuals, yet early-life activity has rarely been linked to subsequent survival of animals in the wild. Using high-resolution GPS and body-acceleration data of 93 juvenile white storks ( Ciconia ciconia ), we examined the links between behaviour during both pre-fledging and...
In this chapter, it is shown that environmental changes affect all areas of a bird's life and that many indicators of this change can be found by observing birds and their ecology. There are some general trends observed that obviously apply to most bird species, although not to all, and might be partly biased to the temperate zones of the Northern...
Data from: Study "LifeTrack White Stork Kosova"
Soaring landbirds typically exploit atmospheric uplift as they fly overland, displaying a highly effective energy-saving locomotion. However, large water bodies lack thermal updrafts, potentially becoming ecological barriers that hamper migration. Here we assessed the effects of a sea surface on the migratory performance of GPS-tagged white storks...
The Arctic is entering a new ecological state, with alarming consequences for humanity. Animal-borne sensors offer a window into these changes. Although substantial animal tracking data from the Arctic and subarctic exist, most are difficult to discover and access. Here, we present the new Arctic Animal Movement Archive (AAMA), a growing collection...
Ecological “big data”
Human activities are rapidly altering the natural world. Nowhere is this more evident, perhaps, than in the Arctic, yet this region remains one of the most remote and difficult to study. Researchers have increasingly relied on animal tracking data in these regions to understand individual species' responses, but if we want to...
Timing of activity can reveal an organism's efforts to optimize foraging either by minimizing energy loss through passive movement or by maximizing energetic gain through foraging. Here, we assess whether signals of either of these strategies are detectable in the timing of activity of daily, local movements by birds. We compare the similarities of...
Timing of activity can reveal an organism's efforts to optimize foraging either by minimizing energy loss through passive movement or by maximizing energetic gain through foraging. Here, we assess whether signals of either of these strategies are detectable in the timing of activity of daily, local movements by birds. We compare the similarities of...
Seasonal animal migration is a widespread phenomenon. At the species level, it has been shown that many migratory animal species track similar climatic conditions throughout the year. However, it remains unclear whether such a niche tracking pattern is a direct consequence of individual behaviour or emerges at the population or species level throug...
Background
The use of tracking technologies is key for the study of animal movement and pivotal to ecological and conservation research. However, the potential effects of devices attached to animals are sometimes neglected. The impact of tagging not only rises welfare concerns, but can also bias the data collected, causing misinterpretation of the...
Studying the causes and consequences of route selection in animal migration is important for understanding the evolution of migratory systems and how they may be affected by environmental factors at various spatial and temporal scales. One key decision during migration is whether to cross ‘high transport cost’ areas or to circumvent them. Soaring b...
An English version follows the Russian
An English version follows the Russian
An English version follows the Russian
Many juvenile birds turn into long-distance migrants within weeks of fledging. This transition involves upheavals in their energy management as major changes in growth and activity occur. Understanding such ontogenetic transitions in energy allocation has been difficult because collecting continuous data on energy costs in wild developing birds was...
Studying the causes and consequences of route selection in animal migration is important for understanding the evolution of migratory systems and how they may be affected by environmental factors at various spatial and temporal scales. One key decision during migration is whether to cross “high transport cost” areas, or to circumvent them. Soaring...
Human‐induced changes in the climate and environment that occur at an unprecedented
speed are challenging the existence of migratory species. Faced with these
new challenges, species with diverse and flexible migratory behaviors may suffer less
from population decline, as they may be better at responding to these changes by
altering their migratory...
Understanding the movement of animals is important for a wide range of scientific interests including migration, disease spread, collective movement behaviour and analysing motion in relation to dynamic changes of the environment such as wind and thermal lifts. Particularly, the three-dimensional (3D) spatial-temporal nature of bird movement data,...
Long-distance seed dispersal is an important ecosystem service provided by migratory animals. Plants inhabiting discrete habitats, like lakes and wetlands, experience dispersal limitation, and rely heavily on zoochory for their spatial population dynamics. Granivorous waterbirds may disperse viable seeds of wetland plants over long distances during...
Outreach and citizen science are important aspects in research and development. For example, the collection of bird-related data is driven forward by non-professional ornithologists as well as by researchers.
At the exhibition “From Lake Constance to Africa, a long distance travel with ICARUS” which took place during the summer 2018 at the island...
Aim
Animal movement is an important determinant of individual survival, population dynamics and ecosystem structure and function. Nonetheless, it is still unclear how local movements are related to resource availability and the spatial arrangement of resources. Using resident bird species and migratory bird species outside the migratory period, we...
Avifauna of the Birds of Baden-Württemberg, chapter on Greylag Geese (Anser anser)
Avifauna of Baden-Württemberg, chapter on Egyptian Geese
Early arrival at breeding grounds is of prime importance for migrating birds as it is known to enhance breeding success. Adults, males and higher quality individuals typically arrive earlier, and across years, early arrival has been linked to warmer spring temperatures. However, the mechanisms and potential costs of early arrival are not well under...
Soaring migrant birds exploit columns of rising air (thermals) to cover large distances with minimal energy. Using social information while locating thermals may benefit such birds, but examining collective movements in wild migrants has been a major challenge for researchers. We investigated the group movements of a flock of 27 naturally migrating...
Considerate rise of knowledge of bats distribution and their important habitats has been made in the past decade in Montenegro, Albania and Macedonia, therefore bat fauna of Kosovo is now the least known in the region. Last overview (Paunović 2016) has listed only 14 bat species on 10 sites, based on observations preceding 1996. During the last two...
In 2016 - 2017 for the first time in Kosovo a pilot project for White Stork GPS tracking was started. In 2016 we equipped three white storks (Ciconia ciconia) nestlings and in 2017 two of them with GPS loggers including accelerometers. We used this method to study the migratory orientation of juvenile white storks from the population in Kosovo duri...
Exploring how flocks of soaring migrants manage to achieve and maintain coordination while exploiting thermal updrafts is important for understanding how collective movements can enhance the sensing of the surrounding environment. Here we examined the structural organization of a group of circling white storks ( Ciconia ciconia ) throughout their m...
Restrictions on roaming
Until the past century or so, the movement of wild animals was relatively unrestricted, and their travels contributed substantially to ecological processes. As humans have increasingly altered natural habitats, natural animal movements have been restricted. Tucker et al. examined GPS locations for more than 50 species. In ge...
The Blackcap Sylvia atricapilla is a model species for the evolution of bird migration in a time of global change. However, many assumptions about putative changes to their migratory paths have not been verified because, until recently, it has not been possible to track individual small passerines throughout the entire migration cycle. With the rec...
Bio-logging, the on-animal deployment of miniaturised electronic data recorders, allows for the study of location, body position, and physiology of individuals throughout their ontogeny. For terrestrial animals, 1 Hz GPS-position, 3D-body acceleration, and ambient temperature provide standard data to link to the physiology of life histories. Enviro...