Featured member, January 2026: Tim Hofmeester
Hi Tim! Tell us about yourself and your work.
I work as an associate professor in wildlife biology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. My research focuses on the application of conservation technology (camera traps, acoustic recorders, drones, deep learning, and advanced statistics) to study and monitor wildlife. I work on a large range of species, from birds and bats to lynx and moose, although my main passion lies with small carnivores and their ecology. Most of my research focuses on applied questions within wildlife management (how many animals are there of a certain species in a certain area, and how are they distributed) or fundamental questions related to how humans and the environment (landscape, climate) impact wildlife populations.
What kinds of research directions and/or collaborations would you like to see or be part of in the future?
One of the big problems at the moment for wildlife biologists such as myself is that although new technologies have opened up a lot of possibilities to answer new questions, they are generating a lot of files. Manually annotating all these files to get to the underlying data takes a lot of time, so we are more and more looking for automated solutions to create usable data from these files. One of the most important collaborations that I see is with data scientists, finding solutions to handle large amounts of files, annotate them, and store them in a FAIR way. Ideally, these solutions should be developed and maintained by engaged communities in an open-source way to ensure long-term support and functionality. This would open up a large number of opportunities for biodiversity monitoring worldwide, as many NGOs and conservation organisations want to implement technologies, but often lack the skills to do this in a sustainable way.
Are there any opportunities or initiatives in your group that you would like the Climate Nordics AI community to know about?
I currently have a vacancy for a PhD position on the interface between bioacoustic monitoring, deep learning, and applied statistics, with some nice datasets on bird and bat diversity in Swedish forests. If this sounds interesting you can find more information through the following link: https://www.slu.se/en/about-slu/work-at-slu/jobs-and-vacancies/doktorand5/.
Where can people reach you?
I am somewhat active on LinkedIn and Slack, but email still works best.
- Email: tim.hofmeester@slu.se
- Profile page: https://www.slu.se/en/profilepages/h/tim-hofmeester/