In this postdoc, I work with decades of tracking data and shorebird observations to model migration behaviour in shorebirds. Changes to migration timing, routes, and distributions has been documented for other species and flyways, and may thus be occuring along the East-Asian Australasian Flyway but has only received limited attention so far. Given that shorebirds are also considered the main carriers of avian influenza viruses into Australia, any changes to migration behaviour also influence disease risk, which is especially important as Australia currently remains one of the few places free of High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1.

This NESP-funded project integrates global change processes, movement behaviour, and disease ecology to improve our understanding and predictive capacity of HPAI incursion risk into Australia. My part of this project focusses on modelling how migration timing and routes are influenced by global change processes like climate change and habitat loss along the flyway.