Uffe usually teaches at DTU. Recently, however, the trip went to Greenland, where the students could see how his teaching relates to reality.
Wauw! Have a look at these awesome photos from Qeqertarsuaq, at Disko Island off the west coast of Greenland.
In the first half of May, Associated Professor Uffe Høgsbro Thygesen from our research section Dynamical Systems at DTU Compute (DynSys) participated as a lecturer in a combined PhD course and workshop in Greenland.
The event was interdisciplinary and included modellers as well as field biologists, so statistical time series analysis was intertwined with tagging of bowhead whales, drone videos, and plankton sampling.
The bowhead whales are tagged with electronic sensors for following their movements and behaviour. Scientists are particularly interested in whether the whales change their "annual cycle" of migrations and foraging, now that the water in the Arctic has warmed. Although the tagging could look a bit violent it does not hurt the whales. - Stock size is monitored primarily through observations from aircraft.
The event took place at the newly renovated Arctic Station of University of Copenhagen, located in Qeqertarsuaq, at Disko Island in western Greenland, and was organized by Susanne Ditlevsen (University of Copenhagen) and Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen (Greenland Institute of Natural Resources).
When not documenting whale tagging, Uffe lectured on the use of data storage tags, modeling animal behaviour using dynamic optimization, and using game theory to explain patterns in ecosystems. Student projects included movement patterns and abundance estimates of whales, and finding signatures of global change in climate time series.