Dr. Robin Freeman

I'm currently the Head of the Indicators and Assessments Unit at the Zoological Society of London. I also work closely with the Centre for Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research at UCL and the Computational Ecology group at Microsoft Research Cambridge and am a research associate with the Animal Behaviour group at Oxford University.

Research

My research spans many disciplines from understanding the status and trends of global biodiversity, the creation of new kinds of technology for monitoring and tracking animals in the wild, to remote fieldwork utilising those technologies and new methods for analysing and interpreting the data we are now able to collect.

Within the Indicators and Assessments Unit, we launched the 2014 Living Planet Report, highlighted the severe declines in global wildlife populations.

In collaboration with Microsoft Research, I launched Mataki, an open, programmable, tracking technology to enables the collection of new kinds of movement data. With the Zoological Society of London, we have recently run a call for collaborations to get these devices into some exciting conservation projects.

One of the main strands of my research to date has been the spatial and movement ecology of seabirds, from identifying and predicting behaviours that occur during foraging, to the analysis of multiple years of global migration data and how migratory behaviour varies with environmental drivers. This has involved both complex fieldwork, but also the creation of new analytical tools to identify and predict behaviour from biologging data. 

I'm also very interested in the decisions and dynamics of groups, and how decision making and information transfer can be identified within movement data. 

Research Interests: 

• Data-driven ecology and conservation
• Animal behaviour and conservation
• Computational and technological systems for ecological data collection
• Spatial ecology, foraging and migration.
• Analysis and modelling of animal movements
• Collective Behaviour
• Spatial analysis and visualisation

 

Publications

• See my Google Scholar page: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=Yqr44OcAAAAJ&hl=en

Some selected recent publications

• Jacoby, D. M., & Freeman, R. (2016). Emerging network-based tools in movement ecology. Trends in ecology & evolution, 31(4), 301-314.
• Dixon, M. J. R., Loh, J., Davidson, N. C., Beltrame, C., Freeman, R., & Walpole, M. (2016). Tracking global change in ecosystem area: The Wetland Extent Trends index. Biological Conservation, 193, 27-35.
• McRae, L., Freeman, R., Deinet, S. (2014) The State of the Planet in McLellan, R, et al., eds. Living Planet Report 2014: species and spaces, people and places. World Wide Fund for Nature, 2014.
• Flack, A., Biro, D., Guilford, T., Freeman, R. (2015) Modelling group navigation: transitive social structures improve navigational performance. Journal of The Royal Society Interface 12, no. 108 (2015): 20150213.