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Movement is a fundamental property of life and almost all living creatures locomote around the earth in complex patterns at differing spatial and temporal scales. Often, movement incorporates the spread of e.g. small organisms, pathogens or seeds attached to the moving animals or other transportation vectors. Lately, the extremely intensive human travel and cargo transportation presently lead to problems like global bionvasion and epidemics spread. Furthermore, due to climate change, migratory schedules and routes of some bird species changed. Large-scale movement and transportation systems often possess an inherent network structure and can easily be modelled as commotion events between discrete habitat patches. In this work we developed network representations of the global cargo ship traffic as well as the migratory movement of some bird species. We have quantified movement patterns on the networks with the use of AIS-trajectories, satellite telemetry and GPS data, and characterised it with different network measures, in the light of spread and bioinvasion possibilities. Additionally, large-scale displacement patterns of birds were statistically described from ring-recaptures.

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The author has started her scientific endeavour at the Univeristy of Greifswald, studying Biomathematics. She did her PhD studies 2005-2009 at the University of Potsdam and the ICBM in Oldenburg, of which the thesis at hand is the result. Presently, she works on Movement Ecology at the Netherlands Insitute of Ecology.

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