Frederic Bartumeus

Centre de Recerca Ecològica i Aplicacions Forestals (CREAF) & Centre for Advanced Studies of Blanes (CSIC - CEAB)

Life & Medical Sciences

Frederic Bartumeus is an ICREA Research Professor in Computational and Theoretical Ecology at the Centre for Advanced Studies of Blanes (CEAB-CSIC) since November 2013. He also holds the same status at CREAF since 2016. He holds a MSc in Plankton Ecology (1997), and a PhD in Biological Sciences (2005) from the University of Barcelona, Spain, where he applied random walk and generalized diffusion theory to develop animal search theory. He joined the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, USA (2006-2009), where he went in depth on the stochastic modeling of animal movement and dispersal. Back to Spain, he completed his postdoctoral research on vector-borne diseases at the Institut Català del Clima (IC3). With a Ramón y Cajal position (2010) he founded his own lab, the Movement Ecology Laboratory, focused on animal movement (including humans) and search strategies, disease vectors, and computational ecology.


Research interests

My research is focused in the emerging field of movement ecology, which aims to reveal the complex forces that drive movement and dispersal patterns of animals (including humans). Improved tracking technology (GPS, bio-loggers, smart-phones) demands an integrative view, with new computational tools and modeling frameworks to understand unprecedented levels of detail from a constantly growing number of species. I am contributing to this scientific revolution based on a broad, highly collaborative and interdisciplinary research program, founded solidly on statistical physics and quantitative ecology. A central question in my research is how animals use information and their motor properties to optimize search strategies. The mechanistic linkage between behavioral processes and movement patterns is also key to understanding globalised problems such as the perpetuation of social inequality among humans or the spread of vector-borne infectious diseases.

Selected publications

– Krummel MF, Bartumeus F & Gérard A 2016, ‘T-cell Migration, Search Strategies and Mechanisms’, Nature Reviews Immunology, 16, 3, 193 – 201.

Bartumeus F et al. 2016, ‘Foraging success under uncertainty: space use and search tradeoffs’, Ecology Letters, 19, pp. 1299-1313.

– Reynolds AM, Bartumeus F, Andrea K & van de Koppel J 2016, ‘Signatures of chaos in animal search patterns’, Scientific Reports, 6, 23492.

– Garriga J, Palmer JRB, Oltra A & Bartumeus F 2016, ‘Expectation-Maximization Binary Clustering for Behavioural Annotation’, Plos One, 11(3):e0151984.

– Aspillaga E, Bartumeus F et al. 2016, ‘Ordinary and Extraordinary Movement Behaviour of Small Resident Fish within a Mediterranean Marine Protected Area’, Plos One, 11(7): e0159813.

– Campos D, Bartumeus F et al. 2016, ‘Variability in individual activity bursts improves ant foraging success’, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 13:20160856.

– Gutierrez-Roig M et al. 2016, ‘Active and reactive behaviour in human mobility: the influence of attraction points on pedestrians’, Royal Society Open Science, 3:160177.

– Oltra A, Palmer JRB & Bartumeus F 2016, ‘AtrapaelTigre.com: enlisting citizens-scientists in the war on tiger mosquitoes’, in European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic Information, Ubiquity Press, chapter 22, pp. 295–308, Eds. Capineri C et al.

– Rodriguez A, Bartumeus F & Gavaldà R 2016, ‘Machine Learning Assists the Classification of Reports by Citizens on Disease-Carrying Mosquitoes’, Proceedings of the Workshop on Data Science for Social Good, European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery (ECML PKDD).


Selected research activities

I became staff member of CREAF.
Organizer of the Workshop “Data Challenge on Behavioural Annotation” (IAPC 2016).
Evaluator for the National Geographic (USA) – I+D projects and  for the Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC, USA) – personnel careers.
I was nominator of the prestigious Kyoto Prize 2017 (Inamori Foundation, Japan).