Theoretical ecologist with a passion for math and computing
I am a biologist with a passion for theoretical ecology and animal movement. I have experience in many different fields of biology, from muscle physiology to macroecology and biogeography. Currently a PostDoctoral research at iDiv. I live inside the Tower of Babel: I am Italian, my wife is Bulgarian, we met in Denmark, and we live in Germany. I am an avid reader of ancient history and I love sumo.
Expanding our knowledge of how animals use energy landscapes. Developing theory and methods to estimate energy costs. Analyzing telemetry data.
I got into movement ecology during my MSc degree, where I studied how ants behavior can be described by a combination of slow and fast movements. I kept moving in this field during my PhD, where I assessed how deep-time megafaunal extinctions have reduced biotic connectivity by removing megalinker species from ecosystems (Berti & Svenning, 2020). In my PostDoc, I got interested in energy landscapes: I developed a framework to quantify energy costs of travel for terrestrial animals (Berti et al., 2021) and applied it for fundamental research (Berti et al., 2025) as well as for conservation practices (Carter et al., 2024). More is to come.
Integrating data for ecological research. Developing pipelines and methods for data acquisition and processing. Expanding data sources and best practices into ecology.
Ecology has reached new levels of data complexity and scale. However, there is big scope for improving how we use such data. We should improve our fundamental understanding of the data used in ecology, provide easy access to it, and expand the reproducibility of analyses. I am committed to these goals with a combination of effective communication, software development (e.g. Gauzens et al., 2023), and guidelines for best practices (e.g. GreniƩ et al., 2022). Without such advancements, ecology cannot reach the maturity to comprehend the complex processes that elude us today.