Past Courses / Events

Camera trapping for large scale monitoring

Institute Seminar by Fabiola Iannarilli
  • Date: Feb 10, 2026
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Fabiola Iannarilli
  • Fabiola Iannarilli works on identifying drivers of species distribution and population dynamics at local and global scale. As a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Fabiola aims at assessing the impact of humans and domestic animals on the occurrence and activity patterns of mammals across Europe. Most of her recent work centers on new advancements in the collection, processing, and analysis of camera-trap data to inform wildlife conservation, monitoring and management. Fabiola is passionate about supporting collaborative approaches in ecological research. She coordinates Snapshot Europe, a collaborative, pan-European camera-trap project that surveys wildlife using standardized protocols, and is a co-lead in the Biodiversa+ project Big_Picture, which aims at integrating Europe’s camera-trap wildlife data using shared digital infrastructure, AI, and analytical tools to enable continent-scale assessments of species’ status for policy-making.
  • Location: University of Konstanz + online
  • Room: ZT702 + online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: refrat@ab.mpg.de
Over the past three decades, camera trapping has rapidly evolved into a central tool for wildlife monitoring and ecological research. Camera-trap data are nowadays widely used to quantify population-level metrics such as species occurrence, abundance, activity patterns, behavior, and reproduction ... [more]

Next Career Steps in Academia – How the System Works and How to Navigate It

Institute Seminar by Daniel Piechowski
  • Date: Feb 3, 2026
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Daniel Piechowski
  • Location: Hybrid meeting
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: dpiechowski@ab.mpg.de
How do academic careers really work—and what does it take to move to the next stage? This seminar provides a clear, realistic overview of academic career paths for PhD students and postdocs. It explains how positions are funded, what is evaluated at different career stages, and why planning ahead ... [more]

Spider sleep – what we know and what we still dream of

Institute Seminar by Daniela Rößler
  • CANCELED
  • Date: Feb 3, 2026
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Daniela Rößler
  • Fueled by curiosity and a deep love of natural history, Daniela Rößler’s academic career began with the study of visual signals and anti-predator adaptations in amphibians before shifting to arachnids—focusing on the remarkable cognitive abilities of jumping spiders. During her postdoc, Daniela discovered a REM-like sleep state in spiders and, building on this finding, she established a research group that uses integrative field, lab, and comparative approaches to investigate the function, ecology, and evolution of sleep across the spider tree of life. Her overarching goal is to highlight the influence of sleep on behavior more broadly and across taxa—an often-overlooked dimension in behavioral ecology.
  • Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: asaralkar@ab.mpg.de
Much remains unknown about the diversity and evolution of sleep in invertebrates. Recent findings reveal compelling evidence for REM sleep–like behaviors in jumping spiders, including retinal movements and limb twitches. These behaviors, observed in a visually guided lineage far removed from ... [more]

Applying Tinbergen’s four questions to a conservation problem: Tolerance to humans in a social desert species

Institute Seminar by Oded Berger-Tal
  • changed location
  • Date: Jan 27, 2026
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Oded Berger-Tal
  • Oded Berger-Tal is an associate professor in the Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His research group is conducting rigorous behavioral research aimed directly at mitigating conservation and wildlife management problems and advising the conservation and management decision-makers in Israel and beyond. In the past few years, in addition to conceptually developing the field of conservation behavior, he is focusing on topics such as developing non-lethal behavioral interventions to alleviate human-wildlife conflict, examining the impacts of various aspects of noise pollution (including infra-sound) on wildlife, understanding the mechanisms of high-tolerance to humans in wild Nubian ibex, studying the impacts of tourism on wildlife, and investigating the behavioral differences between animals utilizing anthropogenic environments and their less anthropogenically-exposed conspecifics.
  • Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: refrat@ab.mpg.de
Conservation behavior is the application of animal behavior knowledge and methodologies to help conserve species and ecosystems. In order to ensure that behavioral research can indeed be useful in conservation contexts, the choice of the study system and research question has to be made together ... [more]

Age-related movement behaviour as a window into population dynamics

Rado Seminar by Sofia Bolumar
  • Date: Jan 23, 2026
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Sofia Bolumar
  • Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: ksafi@ab.mpg.de
Heterogeneity in individual performance drives changes in population size, resilience, and future trajectories, as differences in life-history tactics can shift sex ratio, age structure, and ultimately population growth. In many vertebrates, age structure is a fundamental driver of population ... [more]

Behavior and Population Dynamics of Top Predators

Institute Seminar by John F. Benson
  • Date: Jan 20, 2026
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: John F. Benson
  • I have conducted field research on wildlife populations across much of North America studying wolves, mountain lions, black bears, coyotes, moose, mule deer, bighorn sheep, elk, white sharks, and other species. I am motivated by a desire to inform the conservation of wildlife and wild places – and by a fascination with the natural world. My work combines population, behavioral, molecular, and landscape ecology as I attempt to understand factors influencing individuals, populations, ecological communities, and ecosystems. In my lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, my students, postdocs, and I conduct intensive field studies around the world, asking questions grounded in ecological theory and using quantitative approaches to achieve practical outcomes and contribute to basic ecological understanding.
  • Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: lrosales@ab.mpg.de
Top predators play important roles in ecological communities and yet their populations are declining globally in response to a variety of human-caused stressors. Large carnivores persist in some contemporary landscapes dominated by humans, presenting challenges and opportunities for conservation and ... [more]

Institute Seminar by Claudio Sillero

Institute Seminar by Claudio Sillero
  • CANCELED
  • Date: Jan 13, 2026
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Claudio Sillero
  • Location: University of Konstanz
  • Room: ZT 702 + online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: adeshpande@ab.mpg.de
[more]

A unique center for urban bat rescue and monitoring in Ukraine - history from a war zone

Rado Seminar by Anton Vlaschenko
  • Date: Dec 12, 2025
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Anton Vlaschenko
  • Dr. habil. Anton Vlaschenko is a bat researcher and conservationist with Ukrainian origin currently based in the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin. Anton is co-founders and a co-leader of the Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Centre (Kharkiv), which is widely known in Ukraine and among bat researchers in Europe for its bat rescue measures. Beyond his work done to rescue bats, Anton is a head of the Education and Research Bat Biology Laboratory of H.S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University.
  • Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: aflack@ab.mpg.de
The urban landscapes of Ukrainian cities have become important winter habitats for bats due to the abundance of multi-storey Soviet-era buildings, which offer numerous roosting opportunities. Over the past 40-50 years, both the number of bat records and the diversity of bat species have ... [more]

The ecology of collective behavior across oceanic scales

EAS Department Seminar by Will Oestreich
  • Date: Dec 10, 2025
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Will Oestreich
  • Will Oestreich studies animal behavior in dynamic and changing ecosystems. He is a group leader in the Department of Evolutionary Biology & Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, and an affiliated researcher with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Will has a particular interest in oceanic ecosystems, exploring how biophysical variation and information interact to shape behavior in the open and deep ocean. He also interrogates how we as humans can collectively understand, steward, & adapt to the changing ecosystems of which we are all a part.
  • Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Oceanic ecosystems comprise Earth's largest living space. In these vast, fluid, and mostly dark ecosystems, resources aggregate in patchy, fleeting hotspots of biological activity. These conditions pose immense challenges both for resident lifeforms and researchers seeking to elucidate their ... [more]

Using acoustic tools for conservation

Institute Seminar by Israel Maciel
  • Date: Dec 9, 2025
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Israel Maciel
  • Israel Maciel is a biologist with a PhD in Animal Biology from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro. Since 2020, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and is currently also a lecturer at the same university. His expertise lies in bioacoustics and animal behavior, with over 15 years of experience in marine mammal research and conservation. He has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed publications and contributes to national and international projects assessing the impact of anthropogenic noise on marine wildlife.
  • Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: eperinot@ab.mpg.de
The rapid and ongoing decline in global biodiversity highlights the need for effective conservation measures, which has transformed the monitoring of biodiversity into an essential diagnostic tool. Over the past few decades, studies in biodiversity monitoring have increasingly invested in the use of ... [more]
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