Avian migration · quantitative ecology · data science
Bird migration across space, time, and data Yangkang Chen · 陈旸康
I am a PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying how migratory birds move, associate, and evolve across broad spatial and temporal scales using large biodiversity datasets, statistical modeling, and machine learning.
Research
I study how migration is organized across populations, communities, and genomes.
My work uses bird migration as a model system for understanding large-scale ecological and evolutionary dynamics. I develop quantitative approaches for inferring processes that are difficult to observe directly from modern biodiversity, weather, movement, and genomic data.
Migration modeling
I work on BirdFlow and stemflow to infer population-level movement, seasonal distributions, and spatiotemporal ecological patterns from large, imperfect observational datasets.
Ecology and evolution of continental-scale migration
I study how migration, species associations, weather, and community structure vary across the annual cycle, and how these dynamics may scale up to broader ecological and evolutionary patterns.
Population genetic and genomic research
My earlier and continuing interests in population genetics and genomics inform how I connect ecological process, evolutionary history, and biological inference across scales.
Visual archive
Birds, mountains, meetings, and notes from the scientific life.
The gallery keeps a visual record around the research: birds, landscapes, conferences, travel, and the ordinary materials of becoming a scientist.
Selected work
Methods, migration, and biological inference.
A compact route into the major directions of my work without turning the homepage into a documentation index.
BirdFlow and stemflow
Computational tools and modeling frameworks for inferring bird movement and spatiotemporal ecological structure from large biodiversity datasets.
Technical writing
Workflows and notes on computational ecology, population genetics, data science, scientific Python, and visualization.
Research life and notes
Conference notes, submissions, personal updates, and informal writing that belongs around the scientific work.