Frederic Bartumeus

Frederic Bartumeus

Centre d'Estudis Avançats de Blanes & Centre de Recerca Ecològica i Aplicacions Forestals

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

Bartumeus F et al. 2024, ‘Present and future suitability of invasive and urban vectors through an environmentally driven mosquito reproduction number‘, Proceedings of the royal society b-biological sciences, 291 – 2034 – 20241960.
– Garriga J & Bartumeus F 2024, ‘Towards a comprehensive visualisation of structure in large scale data sets‘, Machine learning-science and technology, 5 – 3 – 030503.
Bartumeus F et al. 2024, ‘Spatiotemporal organization of ant foraging from a complex systems perspective‘, Scientific reports, 14 – 1 -12801.
– Lu L, Zhang F, Oude Munnink BB, Munger E, Bartumeus F, Sikkema RS, Pappa S, et al, 2024, “West Nile virus spread in Europe: Phylogeographic pattern analysis and key drivers“, PLoS Pathog 20(1): e1011880.
– Blanco Sierra L, Savvidou EC, Mpakovasili ED, Ioannou CS, Bartumeus F & Papadopoulos NT, 2024, ‘Effect of water salinity on immature
mosquito‘, Parasites & Vectors 17:24.
– Blanco-Sierra L, Bellver-Arnau J, Escartin S, Mariani S & Bartumeus F 2024, ‘Human-Environment Interactions Shape Mosquito Seasonal Population Dynamics‘, Insects, 15 – 7 -527.

Selected research activities

World Summit Award (WSA 2023) for the Mosquito Alert Observatory, as an outstanding digital innovation for social good: