Meet The Team

I am a PhD student studying how chimpanzees coordinate their movements through communication. To do this, I am also exploring better ways to monitor both their movements and their vocalizations using an array of camera traps and acoustic sensors. By employing machine learning models, I hope to distinguish individual chimpanzees calling to one another using data from acoustic sensors placed across the landscape. This will allow us to see who is calling and, more interestingly, who is responding, and perhaps, through camera trap footage, who is ignoring whom. To train my voice model, I spend much of my time collecting vocalizations from known individuals, which means I am also beginning to learn their voices myself! This study will provide evidence about what determines who responds to calls, calls that are thought to play a role in coordinating movement. The project will also offer methodological insights into how best to monitor individual movements and what information we can infer from remote sensing technologies such as camera traps and acoustic sensors.

For my MRes project at UCL I am conducting research at GMERC, examining how wildfire regimes affect the spatio-temporal movement patterns and habitat utilisation of wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in the fire-prone, savannah-mosaic environment of Issa Valley. As wildfires become an increasingly frequent, pervasive, and intense ecological disturbance worldwide, this research aims to contribute to our understanding of their wider ecological effects, providing insights to the fields of conservation biology and fire ecology, as well as adding to a growing body of literature surrounding how fire may have shaped hominid evolution. 

My name is Tarun Kakarala, a student at UCL in the Environmental Anthropology masters. I’m here at Issa studying how pastoralist practices are impacting the area and drivers for increased livestock grazing.