Bennett Stolze

Research interests

My work investigates how environmental change influences migratory bird populations, including shifts in migration timing, movement behaviour, and ecological conditions at stopover and breeding sites along migratory flyways. In particular, I study how global change processes such as climate change and habitat loss reshape the structure and functioning of entire flyways and how these changes affect migration strategies, population connectivity, and the spread of pathogens such as highly pathogenic avian influenza. To address these questions, I combine biologging data and long-term migration observations with large-scale environmental datasets and quantitative modelling approaches, integrating movement tracking data with mechanistic models and data-driven methods to analyse and predict migration dynamics and disease risks in migratory systems.

Project

Predicting bird migrations and its potential for pathogen spread and the associated risks (PhD Project)

In my PhD project, I investigate how migratory birds contribute to the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), particularly the globally emerging H5N1 strain. To address this question, I further develop an existing state-dependent optimal migration model by incorporating infection dynamics as an additional state variable and explicitly modelling seasonal migration processes. The model is first extended for species along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway and subsequently adapted to waterfowl populations in the East Atlantic Flyway. A central outcome of the project is the development of a modelling-based risk assessment tool that allows users to explore potential pathogen spread under different environmental, socio-economic, and climatic scenarios along migratory flyways. The project aims to improve our understanding of disease dynamics in migratory systems and to provide insights relevant for both biosecurity and conservation.

Modelling shorebird migration to assess disease risk amid global change (link: https://www.nespmarinecoastal.edu.au/project/4-26/)

To elucidate current bird migration routes and changes to migration behaviour and site use in response to global change processes, and assess the incursion risk of diseases via Arctic breeding birds to Australia, we aim to use a combination of leg-flag sightings and geolocator tracks of migratory birds collected over the last decades, in combination with state-of-the-art modelling approaches. The leg-flag sightings and tracking data will be analysed to map and detect changes to migration timing, migration routes and breeding ground use, and to parameterise models allowing to assess potential virus transport under different climate-, habitat and socio-economic changes. Building an understanding of where birds go during migration, where they breed, and how these travelling itineraries have changed and will continue to change going into the future will be critically important to understanding disease risk and developing effective mitigation plans, as well as the continued conservation management of shorebirds. Outputs of this project will provide HPAI strategic information and inform policy development, while also supporting international obligations to the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species, migratory bird agreements, and international obligations to Ramsar wetlands.