Understanding lifetime tracks and fitness of long-distance avian migrants

运动是生命的本质，但我们还不了解生物体在其一生中是如何运动的，以及运动如何影响个体的生存和健康。主要由PI和他的合作者建立的新兴领域“运动生态学”，在新技术最终有望在全球范围内实现令人兴奋的发现的黄金时代之际，解决了这些问题。我们建议研究一种典型的脊椎动物——白鹳，并确定来自欧洲和中东六个繁殖种群的数百只个体的一生轨迹。我们将使用新开发的“黑匣子”生物记录技术，该技术使我们能够通过GPS确定精确的位置，并通过3d加速传感器确定鸟类每年连续的洲际迁徙旅程的行为。我们还将通过整体动态身体加速度（ODBA）来量化鸟类的内部状态，并将其与环境中的外部变量（如风、温度、NDVI和降雨）联系起来。分析个体的内部和外部状态与其明显的运动决定的关系，将使我们能够确定其一生的能量使用作为环境变量的函数。反过来，我们将最终在机械水平上理解模式生物在野外的生存和适应性，这是随后个体在空间和时间上的决定的结果。个体决策将包括使用大气辅助、中途停留和觅食决策、冒险、配偶选择、栖息地选择和迁徙走廊的季节性使用。然后，新的建模方法将使我们能够将数百个个体的一生轨迹和决策结合到每个个体在其一生中所经历的环境变化的全球图景中。我们还将能够确定气候和栖息地变化在空间和时间上对大型脊椎动物种群的影响。我们的研究结果将对整个生物学领域产生深远的影响，目前生物学领域迫切需要了解选择压力在何时何地以及如何塑造生物体的设计。这项研究将由四个小组进行，两个在以色列，两个在德国，涉及范围广泛的相互补充的相关专门知识。我们期望这种平衡的结合将促进协同合作，并对影响生物生存和适应性的因素产生新的见解，这是生物学和环境科学的一个未解决的主题。

Movement is the very essence of life, but we do not yet understand how organisms move during their lifetime and how movement affects the survival and fitness of an individual. The emerging field of ”Movement Ecology”, established largely by the PI and his collaborators, addresses these questions at a time when new technology is finally promising a golden era of exciting discoveries on a global scale.We propose to study one exemplary species of vertebrate, the White Stork, and to determine the lifetime tracks of hundreds of individuals from six breeding populations across Europe and the Middle East. We will use the newly developed ‘blackbox’ bio-logging technology that allows us to determine exact position via GPS as well as behavior via 3D-acceleration sensors throughout the birds’ successive inter-continental migratory journeys every year. We will also quantify the internal state of the birds via overall dynamic body acceleration (ODBA), and link that to external variables in the environment such as wind, temperature, NDVI and rainfall. Analyzing the internal and external state of an individual in relation to its apparent movement decisions will allow us to determine its lifetime use of energy as a function of the environmental variables. In turn, we will finally understand survival and fitness of a model organism in the wild on a mechanistic level as the consequence of subsequent individual decisions in space and time. Individual decisions will include the use of atmosphericassistance, stop-over and foraging decisions, risk taking, mate choice, habitat choice and seasonal use of migratory corridors. New modeling approaches will then enable us to combine the lifetime tracks and decisions of hundreds of individuals into a global picture of changes in the environment that every individual experienced during its lifetime. We will also be able to determine the effects that climate and habitat change will exert on populations of large vertebrates in space and time. Our results will have profound consequences for the entire field of biology which is currently in dire need tounderstand where, when and how selection pressures shape the design of organisms. The research will be carried out by four groups, two in Israel and two in Germany covering a broad range of complementary, relevant expertise. We expect that this well-balanced combination will promote a synergistic collaboration and yield new insight into the factors affecting survival and fitness of organisms, an unresolved topic at the very center of biology and environmental sciences.