"Acceleration for Food 2.0"

(by Petra Sumasgutner)

The FWF START project “Acceleration for Food” investigates how human activities alter the hunting and exploitation of food resources by predators and scavengers. By combining GPS and accelerometer data from thousands of tracked raptors, owls and ravens worldwide, the project develops behavioural classification tools that can distinguish activities such as hunting, scavenging, feeding, and movement without direct observation. The work links global-scale analyses from the Anthropause with detailed field studies on common ravens in Austria and Galápagos short-eared owls on Floreana Island, asking how animals adapt their foraging behaviour to human disturbance and rapid environmental change.

We are delighted to announce that the project’s mid-term evaluation received stellar reviews and that the second funding period has now been officially granted. This next phase will expand both the analytical and ecological scope of the research. Methodologically, the project is moving beyond early machine-learning approaches toward AI-based behavioural classification frameworks that allow increasingly fine-scale interpretation of animal movement and sensor data. These tools will help identify subtle behavioural states and interactions that were previously impossible to quantify at large scales.

The Galápagos component is also expanding from predator–prey dynamics to broader intra-guild interactions, examining how owls interact with other predators and scavengers within the island food web as we track the ongoing invasive species removal campaign.

At the same time, the raven research is developing a stronger focus on trap-lining behaviour. Trap-lining describes the repeated use of predictable foraging routes, where animals visit a sequence of reliable food sources in a regular order - similar to a delivery route or circuit. In ravens, this may include systematically checking carcass sites For areas associated with human activity. Understanding how these movement routines emerge and change under human disturbance is becoming a central theme of the project.

👉 For more about the original project, see FWF Blog https://scilog.fwf.ac.at/magazin/wie-beeinflussen-menschen-die-nahrungssuche-von-tieren

credit: Herbert Wölger