“Animals can sense the environment more accurately than people. Ten billion birds are migrating and they are offering clues in their behaviour. Where they go, where they die, and how some survive is our key to knowing more about important changes in our world.”

Behavioural biologist Martin Wikelski may be chasing birds from the ground now but he has his sights set on the international space station with the ICARUS Project. He is developing the world’s smallest GPS tracking system to monitor world-wide migration patterns from the orbiting space platform. He believes that learning more about world-wide  animal migration will give us a completely new understanding of life on the planet. ICARUS and his ground-breaking migration work with Movebank involves over 100 international scientists and engineers in 17 countries.

Martin Wikelski is Director at the Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology based in Radolfzell, Germany, and Professor for Ornithology at the University of Konstanz.