About Me

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.

Description 1
The perfect acoustic of the cave was used by tyrant Dionisio to spy on the plans of political dissidents.
Whispering secrets in front of Dionisio's ear.
Description 1
Luckily I am not that tall and they can still see.
Standing in front of giants.

Research Projects

Project 1 Visualization

How do animals use energy landscapes?

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.

Project 2 Diagram

Ecological Data Science

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. Grenié et al., 2022). Without such advancements, ecology cannot reach the maturity to comprehend the complex processes that elude us today.

Software

enerscape

Compute energy landscapes using a digital elevation model raster and body mass of animals.

ATNr

Simulate the dynamics of species biomasses in food webs using Allometric Trophic Network (ATN) models.

GHCNr

Download and process daily weather data from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) database.

assembly

Simulate community assembly using three procedures: random, resource filtering, and limiting similarity filtering.