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.
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.
Migration decisions
How do environmental variability and social information shape timing, routes, and stopover behavior?
Patterns at scale
How do individual choices accumulate into community-level phenology, distribution, and seasonal dynamics?
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.
Selected work
Projects, software, and research notes.
A more editorial route into the technical material, instead of a long documentation sidebar.
