Avian migration · spatiotemporal ecology · data science

Ecology at migration scale Yangkang Chen · 陈旸康

I am a PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying how birds move through dynamic environments, using large ecological datasets, statistical modeling, and machine learning.

Bird photograph
Birds, migration, and field observations

Research agenda

Migration is a moving conversation between animals, weather, landscapes, and information.

My work connects movement ecology, phenology, species interactions, and computational methods to understand ecological decisions that are difficult to observe directly.

01

Migration decisions

How do environmental variability and social information shape timing, routes, and stopover behavior?

02

Patterns at scale

How do individual choices accumulate into community-level phenology, distribution, and seasonal dynamics?

03

Ecological data science

How can machine learning and spatiotemporal models reveal mechanisms without losing ecological interpretability?

In the field

Ecology should still smell like weather.

The website now leans into the visual world around the research: birds, mountains, field days, conference notes, and the ordinary record of becoming a scientist.

Field and nature photographField and nature photographField and nature photographField and nature photographField and nature photographField and nature photograph

Selected work

Projects, software, and research notes.

A more editorial route into the technical material, instead of a long documentation sidebar.