Frederic Bartumeus

Frederic Bartumeus is an ICREA Research Professor at the Centre for Advanced Studies of Blanes from the Spanish Research Council (CSIC). His research is centered in the emerging fields of computational and theoretical ecology, with main focus on movement and vector ecology. His research entails multidisciplinary science to bridge the gaps between animal behaviour and spatial population dynamics at an unprecedented level of detail, in the context of invasion, epidemics, conservation biology, and fundamental population and behavioural ecology. He is currently contributing to next-generation, high-throughput, large-scale behavioural and dispersal data in the context of mosquito-borne diseases, with the use of novel technologies (internet, smartphones) and citizen participation. He is particularly interested in finding new ways to estimate human-mosquito encounters at a large scale, vital to predicting disease transmission risk. The burst dynamics of insect populations is difficult to trace, precluding us from developing scalable and flexible early warning systems. Digital citizen science and artificial intelligence promise to revolutionize mosquito surveillance by enabling nowcasting and weekly forecasting of mosquito risk exposure across scales.