Davide Baldan: Assessing reproductive responses of wildlife to climate change using AI-assisted analyses

Title

Assessing reproductive responses of wildlife to climate change using AI-assisted analyses

Mentor

Davide Baldan, Ph.D.

Department

Biology

Biosketch

Davide Baldan, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology and a faculty member in the Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology (EECB) graduate program at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received his Ph.D. from Wageningen University, the Netherlands, in 2019 and his M.Sc. in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Padova, Italy.

Davide is a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist whose research focuses on sexual selection, parental cooperation, and the evolution of parental care strategies. His work takes an integrative approach to understanding the behavioral mechanisms underlying parental care and their evolutionary consequences. Throughout his career, he has conducted field research on diverse avian species across the United States, Spain, and Italy, combining behavioral observations with experimental and quantitative approaches to investigate how animals respond to environmental challenges.

Project overview

Climate change is strongly affecting the timing and success of wildlife reproduction, with potentially important consequences for population persistence and extinction risk. We study reproductive responses to environmental change in a wild population of rock sparrows in the Italian Alps, a species that serves as a sentinel for climate change because reproduction is a particularly sensitive period to changes in environmental conditions, including temperature and precipitation. We monitor the breeding behavior of individually identified birds in their natural environment using video recordings and camera traps.

In this project, students will gain hands-on experience working with real wildlife research data and will use AI-based software to automatically extract behavioral information, such as singing, mating, courtship displays, and food provisioning, from hundreds of hours of video recordings. Students will be directly involved in processing and organizing video data, checking and validating AI-generated behavioral detections, compiling datasets, and conducting basic analyses to investigate how reproductive behavior varies with environmental conditions.

This project will provide practical experience in wildlife research, behavioral ecology, AI-assisted data analysis, and the process of transforming raw field recordings into quantitative scientific data. As a final product, the student will prepare a research poster to present at the Wolf Pack Discoveries Symposium and a four-page research report summarizing their findings.

Student Training Opportunities

• Using AI-based software to automatically detect and classify animal behaviors
• Validating AI-generated behavioral detections and assessing data quality
• Basic analysis and interpretation of behavioral data in an ecological context

Required Qualifications

Not applicable.

Maximum hours per week

The PREP student will be expected to work on the project for a maximum of 10 hours per week.

PACK RESEARCH EXPERIENCE PROGRAM INFORMATION AND APPLICATION