profile photo taken on the edge of a woodland, holding a newly ringed blue tit chick

Friederike Hillemann

[freddy; she/her]


Data Science Technician
Department of Animal Ecology
Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW)


Affiliated Postdoctoral Researcher
Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI EVA)

Research


I'm a behavioural ecologist who studies FEASTs - Foraging Ecology And Social Ties. My research focuses on how social connections can help individuals navigate their environments and buffer environmental risks, and I study how individuals’ decisions, driven by social, economic, and ecological factors, affect group-level outcomes, i.e. network structure and social transmission processes like food sharing and social information use.

BSc and MSc research: Animal behaviour, social cognition, and communication
During my studies of (behavioural) biology at the University of Göttingen, I established a fundamental skillset for studying animal behaviour using observational and experiemtal approaches both in the field and using captive animals. For example, I studied post-conflict behaviour and reconciliation in wild Barbary macaques in the Moroccan Middle Atlas Mountains, and vocal communication and collective territory defense in a Spanish population of cooperatively breeding Carrion crows. In-between my degree courses, I interned at the Konrad Lorenz Research Center; together with Claudia Wascher, I tested crows’ and ravens' ability to cope with delayed gratification, which is considered an important cognitive prerequisite for cooperative behaviours. We showed that crows and ravens can forgo an immediate food reward and wait for a more preferred quality food item, which was compared to the famous Marshmallow Test in media articles, e.g., here and here.

PhD research: Socio-ecological factors shaping mixed-species groups
During my DPhil at the University of Oxford's Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology, I studied how mixed-species groups are formed and maintained, linking individual behaviour to community processes. Using individually PIT-tagged songbirds in Wytham Woods near Oxford as a model system, I combined observational and experimental approaches to study social information use and collective behaviour. I developed a framework that is based on concepts of optimality to link processes of group formation to signalling theory and information use, and compared observed pattern of individuals’ social decisions to simulated processes for hypothesis testing. I also studied consistency in individuals’ social phenotypes, and how and why individuals differ in their social behaviours and network positions. Participation in mixed-species flocks is a complex balance of competition cost and grouping benefits, mediated by both individual phenotype and environmental conditions. Read more about the Wytham Tit Project and the challenging data collection in the woods for our work on songbirds' social networks in this Audobon article.

Postdoctoral research: Inuit food production and sharing networks
In July 2020, I joined the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture at the Leipzig-based MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology as a postdoctoral researcher. I analyse data from the Inuit community of Kangiqsujuaq in the Eastern Canadian Arctic to study traditional food production and cooperative sharing networks, and the role of socio-economic status and environmental variability on peoples' subsistence decisions and food security. I work closely with Elspeth Ready as part of the Sanguatsiniq Project.

Sustainable research: Data and code management using FAIR practices
Since I contributed to and worked with valuable long-term ecological dataset and data on human behaviour, I've been committed to implementing rigorous data management and data analyses practices that facilitate transparency and reproducibility.
In February 2024, I took on a role as Data Science Technician for a growing network and database for the Studies of Populations of Individually-marked Birds, SPI-Birds. I help develop a github-implemented infrastructure for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) ecological data and code, building pipelines for standardising data, analytical steps, and code peer-review. SPI-Birds and my position are hosted by the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) in Wageningen. NIOO is part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

Publications

Peer-reviewed Publications
Davidson JD, de Oliveira Lopes FN, Safaei S, Hillemann F, Russell NJ and Schaare HL. 2023. Postdoctoral researchers’ perspectives on working conditions and equal opportunities in German academia. Frontiers in Psychology, 14:1217823, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1217823. [PDF] [tl;dr]

Hillemann F, Beheim BA, Ready E. 2023. Socio-economic predictors of Inuit hunting choices and their implications for climate change adaptation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 378: 20220395, doi: 110.1098/rstb.2022.0395. [PDF] [talk] [tl;dr]

Braga PHP, Hébert K, Hudgins EJ, Scott ER, Edwards BPM, Sánchez Reyes LL, Grainger M, Foroughirad V, Hillemann F, Binley A, Brookson C, Gaynor K, Sabet SS, Güncan A, Weierbach H, Gomes DGE, Crystal-Ornelas R. 2023. Not just for programmers: How GitHub can accelerate collaborative and reproducible research in ecology and evolution. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 14:1364–1380, doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.14108. [PDF] [tl;dr]

Cantor M, Maldonado-Chaparro AA, Beck K, Brandl HB, Carter GG, He P, Hillemann F, Klarevas-Irby JA, Ogino M, Papageorgiou D, Prox L, Farine DR. 2020. Animal social networks: revealing the causes and implications of social structure in ecology and evolution. Journal of Animal Ecology, 00: 1-18, doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.13336. [PDF] [tl;dr]

Hillemann F, Cole EF, Sheldon BC, Farine DR. 2020. Information use in foraging flocks of songbirds - no evidence for social transmission of patch quality. Animal Behaviour, 165: 35-41, doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.04.024. [PDF] [talk] [tl;dr]

Hillemann F, Cole EF, Keen SC, Sheldon BC, Farine DR. 2019. Diurnal variation in the production of vocal information about food supports a model of social adjustment in wild songbirds. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 286: 20182740, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2018.2740. [PDF] [tl;dr]

Wascher CAF, Hillemann F, Canestrari D, Baglione V. 2015. Carrion crows learn to discriminate between calls of reliable and unreliable conspecifics. Animal Cognition, 18: 1181-1185, doi: 10.1007/s10071-015-0879-8. [PDF]

Hillemann F, Bugnyar T, Kotrschal K, Wascher CAF. 2014. Waiting for better, not for more: Corvids respond to quality in two delay maintenance tasks. Animal Behaviour, 90, 1-10, doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.01.007. [PDF]


Preprints
Chan AHH, Dunning J, Burke T, Chik HYJ, Dunleavy D, Evans T, Ferreira A, Fourie B, Griffith SC, Hillemann F, Schroeder J. Animal social networks are robust to changing association definitions. EcoEvoRxiv, doi: 10.32942/X2P890. [PDF]

Hillemann F, Cole EF, Farine DR, Sheldon BC. Wild songbirds exhibit consistent individual differences in interspecific social behaviour. bioRxiv, doi: 10.1101/746545. [PDF] [tl;dr]

Wascher CAF, Hillemann F. Observation of female-male mounting in the carrion crow. bioRxiv, doi: 10.1101/2020.05.26.116004. [PDF]

Susini I, Safryghin A, Hillemann F, Wascher CAF. Delay of gratification in non-human animals: A review of inter- and intra-specific variation in performance. bioRxiv, doi: 10.1101/2020.05.05.078659. [PDF]

Media


[Video] Back Garden Biology: Feed the birds?. By Lindsay Turnbull.
[Article] Audobon: The Surprising Connection Between Birds, Facebook, and Other Social Networks. By Kat McGowan.
[Article] medium: Spring at the Laboratory with Leaves. By Graduate Study at Oxford.
[Article] Audobon: Crows and Ravens are Masters of Self-Control. By Purbita Saha.
[Article] Gizmodo: What Can Crows and Ravens Teach People About Resisting Temptation? By Jason G. Goldman.
[Article] Scientific American: Self-Controlled Crows Ace the Marshmallow Test. By Jyoti Madhusoodanan.


    Department of Animal Ecology
    Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW)
    Droevendaalsesteeg 10, 6708 PB Wageningen, Netherlands

    Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture
    Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
    Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany


    f.hillemann[at]web.de