Hayley Rechter

I grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and received my BSc Hons. in Zoology from Monash University. During my undergraduate degree, I completed two study exchanges to Carleton University. Throughout my academic and professional life, I have sought out opportunities to research and work with a variety of animals. During my Honours, I investigated little penguins and the influence of severe weather on their foraging habits and distribution; at Carleton University, I worked as a research assistant, examining UV mimicry in syrphid flies and hymenopterans.

I am now at the University of Guelph to undertake my Master’s degree. My current research interests include boreal ecology, with a focus on investigating spatio-temporal ecology, and how anthropogenic activity might influence animal movements and behaviour. Under the co-advisory of Dr. Fryxell and Dr. Kremer in Computer Science, I will be developing an AI algorithm to automate the identification of Ontarian wildlife and organize biological data from camera trap imagery. Having experienced the time-consuming manual review processing of video data from my Honours project, I am interested in automating the process, and hope to develop a useful toolkit that can be used by other researchers to investigate animal behaviour.