MOVE@ucsb

Analysis and Modeling of Movement of Tigers in Thailand

Through international interdisciplinary collaboration with the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation of Thailand, MOVE Lab develops analytical approaches and simulation models to understand how tigers and leopards interact with their environment in their ecosystem in the Thailand Western Forest Complex. The aim is to increase our understanding of species resilience through the analysis and modeling of the conspecific and predator-predator interactions across a range of environmental conditions and levels of human impact. The outcomes of this study will contribute to better understanding, and ultimately prediction of the survivability and behavioral changes of tigers in a changing environment. This is especially important with the increase of human-wildlife interaction as a result of greater intensity of land-use change and urbanization.

Mapping and Visualization of Motion

This research focuses on understanding how humans perceive movement visually. Movement is realized in both a three- (or four-) dimensional space (i.e. location and time) and a multidimensional attribute space (i.e. context variables). The syntheses of these two spaces need new effective tools for dynamic visualization of the traversal of a moving individual through these dimensions. Our research advances cartographic theories for movement and creates innovative visualization methods to enhance fundamental knowledge on how motion should be represented in space and time and across scales. For a prototype of this research please see the DYNAMOvis project.