ROAM is the research of animal movement group at James Cook University. Our group is made up of people across diverse disciplines, academic qualifications, gender, cultural backgrounds, and expertise. We are interested in a wide variety of animal movement topics in a manifold of ecosystems and taxa, including crustaceans, fish, birds, mammals, and reptiles.
ROAM was founded and is currently led by Kyana Pike and Emily Webster, with the invigorating collaboration of ROAM members.
We meet every second Tuesday at noon using a mixed virtual and in-person format.
Who we are
Emily Webster
Emily is in the second year of her PhD at James Cook University. She is interested in behaviour and survival of wildlife living in human-dominated land and seascapes. In her Honours research, she studied colonially-breeding wetland birds with GPS-GSM telemetry. She examined their foraging strategies and reproductive success in relation to environmental flows delivered from upstream dams and weirs. Her PhD is part of a long-term mutli-disciplinary collaborative monitoring program. She is working on increasing understanding of fine-scale habitat use by resident green turtles (Chelonia mydas) in industrial inshore foraging grounds with satellite telemetry. She hopes that this information will help to elucidate the risks of human-turtle interactions and inform management options for this protected species.
Kyana Pike
Kyana is a PhD candidate at James Cook University researching the interaction between giant tortoises and agriculture in the Galapagos. Since 2018, Kyana has been collaborating with the Giant Tortoise Movement Ecology Programme (http://gianttortoise.org/en/) to leverage fine scale GPS tracking data to delve into temporal and spatial patterns of farm use by tortoises. She has used movement analysis tools such as occurrence distributions, home range estimators and integrated step selection functions to better understand tortoise use of farmland. These results can then help to provide evidence-based recommendations on how to balance the needs of tortoises and farmers in the Galapagos.
Saúl González
Saúl González Murcia is conducting his PhD at James Cook University studying ecological aspects of sponges and corals and how those interactions affect reef associated fishes. As parallel projects he is assessing movement patterns of intertidal and freshwater fishes in El Salvador. Fishes are a central interest in his research and currently he is trying to determine small scale and daily movement patterns for resident and opportunist intertidal fishes. In freshwater ecosystems his research aims to determine movement patterns of predator fishes and their preys and potential responses that freshwater fishes could have on their movement pattern in the presence of introduced species.
Donald McKnight
Donald works primarily on freshwater and terrestrial turtles and studies home ranges, habitat use, movements among wetlands within meta-populations, and movements as they relate to social behavior. This research is predominantly conservation-focused and includes work on critically endangered species such as the Central American River Turtle (Dermatemys mawii). He is involved in projects from around the world, including research in Australia, the United States of America, and Belize.
César Herrera
César’s interests are spatial ecology, animal movement, biodiversity patterns, ecosystem functioning, probabilistic programming, and computer vision.
Michael Taylor
Mike is a PhD student in the Sequeira Lab (https://sequeiralab.com/) at The University of Western Australia studying ecological links between large marine megafauna and their environment. Working mainly in the Shark Bay World Heritage Area, Mike collaborates with the the Malgana traditional owners of Gathaagudu (Shark Bay) to deploy satellite tags on seagrass loving green turtles and dugongs. Long-term tracks collected from these animals can be used to understand seasonal variation in movement, estimate home ranges and habitat use, and to understand how climate change impacts at risk populations.
Nicolas Lubitz
Nicolas works on movement drivers in animals, using sharks and rays as a case study. He is developing a context-based framework to analysing animal movement data that considers individual and geographical variability in movement behaviour. For example, some individuals of a species make large-scale movements while others do not. While this appears to add a lot of complexity to the question at hand, it actually can help us tease apart why movement occurs in the first place. He is tagging bull sharks in Australia, South Africa and Florida with acoustic and satellite transmitters to track their movements and identify how environmental factors, prey availability, individual reproductive behaviour and genetics influence movement strategies.
Michelle Perez
Michelle recently graduated from James Cook University with a Master of Science (Professional) in Marine Biology. In this program she undertook a minor research project investigating the post-nesting migration patterns of loggerhead turtles from Queensland rookeries using GPS tracking and flipper tag (capture-mark-recapture) data. She is now a Research Worker with JCU examining the spatial use of inter-nesting green turtles at Raine Island in the northern Great Barrier Reef (nGBR). This work includes the use of home range estimators and analysing fine-scale movement patterns to better understand the relationships between movement, habitat use, and reproductive success of the endangered nGBR stock of green turtles.
Kevin Crook
Kevin’s research focuses on understanding the consequences of fine-scale animal movement and behaviour for ecosystem function. To do this, he has developed novel sampling methods, pairing active acoustic telemetry with drone tracking to place behaviour observations within the context of diurnal movement patterns. Using stingrays on coastal sandflats as a model study system, his research has identified fine-scale foraging habitat partitioning among sympatric stingrays that would otherwise have been hidden using habitat use estimates from traditional tracking methods alone. Although his research focuses primarily on stingrays, Kevin is also involved in movement studies on estuarine fish and sharks.
Rebecca Diggins
Rebecca is a James Cook University (JCU) PhD candidate from the UK who is studying sea turtle movement as it relates to conservation outcomes. She has been working with the JCU Turtle Health Research group since 2016 and is currently tracking captive-raised, juvenile hawksbill turtles that were recently released into the wild. The aim of this work is to monitor the behaviour on release and subsequent dispersal of the turtles around the reef to inform best practice for release of juvenile turtles in future. Her research also looks at how the satellite trackers themselves affect the behaviour of the turtles.