Frederic Bartumeus

Frederic Bartumeus

Centre for Advanced Studies of Blanes

Life & Medical Sciences

Since 2014 I have been an ICREA Research Professor in Computational and Theoretical Ecology at CEAB-CSIC and hold an associate research position at CREAF. I hold an MSc in plankton ecology (1997) and a PhD in Biological Sciences (2005) from the University of Barcelona, Spain. I joined the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University (USA) from 2006 to 2009. I completed my postdoctoral research on vector-borne diseases at the Institut Català del Clima (IC3). With a Ramón y Cajal position (2010), I founded my lab at CEAB-CSIC. Currently, it is a joint lab with other researchers named the Theoretical and Computational Ecology Group. In 2018, I was awarded as Distinguished Researcher by the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) and the City Council of Barcelona (Spain) Premi Ciutat Barcelona 2017. 

Research interests

Knowing how animals use the information to search and disperse in dynamic environments can generate direct applications (robotics, bioinformatics) and improve our baseline predictive power with consequences for fields as diverse as behavioural ecology, invasion ecology, or epidemiology. We are contributing to the sudden generation of massive, high-throughput animal movement and behavioural data in the context of vector-borne diseases with the use of novel technologies (internet, smartphones) and citizen participation. We also seek to understand organizational and dynamical principles of search behaviour by developing high-tech infrastructures for tracking movement behaviour at an unprecedented range of scales. More broadly, our work aims at building-up mechanistic links between animal behaviour, dispersal and population dynamics, including the development of data mining algorithms for behavioural annotation of high-resolution trajectories and biologging data, and spatial population modelling.

Selected publications

- Fernandez-Lopez P, Garriga J, Casas I, Yeste M & Bartumeus F 2022, 'Predicting fertility from sperm motility landscapes', Communications Biology, 5, 1, 1027.

- Genovart M, Klementisova K, Oro D, Fernández-López P, Bertolero A, Bartumeus F 2022, 'Inferring the age of breeders from easily measurable variablesScientific Reports 12:15851.

- Južnič-Zonta Z,  et al. 2022. 'Mosquito Alert: leveraging citizen science to create a GBIF mosquito occurrence datasetGigabyte 1-13.

- Carney, RM, et al. 2022, 'Integrating Global Citizen Science Platforms to Enable Next-Generation Surveillance of Invasive and Vector Mosquitoes', Insects, 13, 8, 675.

- Lucati F, et al. 2022, 'Multiple invasions, Wolbachia and human‑aided transport drive the genetic variability of Aedes albopictus in the Iberian Peninsula', Scientific Reports 12:20682.

- Chen GJ, Palmer JRB, Bartumeus F, Alba-Casals A 2022, 'Modeling the impact of surveillance activities combined with physical distancing interventions on COVID-19 epidemics at a local level', Infectious Disease Modelling 7:811e822.

- Colaco JR, Araujo HA, da Luz MGE, Viswanathan GM, Bartumeus F & Raposo EP 2022, 'Effect of the search space dimensionality for finding close and faraway targets in random searches', Physical Review E, 106, 3, 034124.

- Carames LGP,  Matos YB, Bartumeus F, Bezerra CG, Macri T, da Luz MGE, Raposo EP & Viswanathan GM 2022, 'Levy walkers inside spherical shells with absorbing boundaries: Towards settling the optimal Levy walk strategy for random searches', Physical Review E, 106, 5, 054147.

Selected research activities

Several Authors. 2022. Oficina de Ciencia y Tecnología del Congreso de los Diputados. Infomre C: Inteligencia Artificial y Salud.