The Faculty of Biology at the University of Białystok (UwB) will carry out a project ‘Movement analysis of forest-dwelling avian predators: a novel bioindication method for evaluating functional heterogeneity in forest ecosystems’. The research will be led by Dr Ülo Väli from the Estonian University of Life Sciences in Tartu in collaboration with Dr Pawel Mirski from UwB.

The field part of the research will be carried out in a model forest ecosystem – the Białowieża Forest. There, using GPS telemetry, the researchers will check how the movement of birds of prey is affected by the structure of the forest, and thus whether data on the use of space by predators can be used as a functional indicator of forest quality.

‘By tracking the movements of birds of prey, we will find out which features of the forest structure are particularly valuable to the wide range of prey that these predators follow, and whether the observation of movement patterns themselves carries information about the quality of the habitat’, explains Dr Paweł Mirski from the Faculty of Biology at UwB.