Research Objectives
Each year billions of animals navigate with pinpoint accuracy over vast distances. For example, experienced birds find their way with centimetre precision between a nest site in Europe and a sleeping perch in Africa thousands of kilometres away. To achieve this, they use many senses including vision, olfaction, and a magnetic sense, seemingly based on quantum mechanical effects at ambient temperature. In total, animal migrations move millions of tonnes of biomass across the globe. Thus, navigating animals are essential for global ecosystems.
The mission of our proposal “NaviSense: International Cluster of Excellence Proposal for the Sensory Basis, Mechanisms, and Impacts of Animal Navigation” is to provide a thorough, interdisciplinary understanding of the senses and mechanisms used by animals to navigate, and how these mechanisms can inspire technology and impact society, ecology, and biodiversity.
To achieve our mission, we unite internationally leading scientists from different branches of biology, physics, chemistry, computer sciences, and social sciences from six different institutions. As a team, we will carry out novel and uniquely interdisciplinary research providing unprecedented opportunities to understand fundamental mechanisms far beyond what the individual scientists and disciplines could have achieved working alone. For instance, we aim to solve two of the most intriguing mysteries of sensory biology: (1) how animals find their way to a distant destination, relying only on their senses, and (2) whether quantum mechanical effects at ambient temperature provide the basis of the magnetic sense, one of the most important senses used in long-distance navigation.
NaviSense is structured into four interconnected research foci (RF): animal navigation mechanisms and their underlying senses (RF1); quantum effects at ambient temperature in model systems and biology (RF2); ecological and conservation related consequences of animal navigation (RF3); linking biological and technical systems through models, algorithms, and devices (RF4).
The acquired knowledge about animal navigation and its underlying sensory mechanisms has never been more relevant for helping to solve major societal questions related, for instance, to the environmental impact of anthropogenic sensory pollution, the biodiversity crisis, GPS independent navigation of human made devices, and quantum sensing at ambient temperature.
Video Collection
Get to know our team, some of our research topics, methodologies and unique facilities.