dr. H (Hugo) Loning

I am a behavioural biologist with a strong interest in how evolutionary pressures shape the vocalisations of animals. Why, what and with whom animals communicate fascinate me. What's great about studying animal sounds, is that they can be so accurately recorded. Afterwards, these recorded behaviours can be quantified in detail using computational signal processing and more recently, machine learning approaches. My study subjects are mainly birds, but I have also worked on bats and frogs. I am very interested in how we can use individually distinct sounds to learn more about individual-level survival, reproduction, movement and social interactions.

I am board member of the Netherlands Society for Behavioural Biology and member of the Dutch Birdsong Network.

My papers (all open access) can be found via my Google Scholar.

Research questions I work on:

How do sounds mediate the social organization of wild zebra finches? – work in collaboration with Marc Naguib (Wageningen University) & Simon Griffith (Macquarie University, Sydney), see this news article or this Dutch radio interview (at 1:43:00).

Can we automate the detection of individual animals from audio streams? – work in collaboration with Aneesh Chauhan (Wageningen Research), see this blog article.

Can birdsong reduce the impact of anthropogenic sound stressors such as airplane noise? – I co-supervise PhD-candidate Rodrigo Vassallo in collaboration with Martijn Lugten & Arjan van Timmeren (TU Delft)

Student opportunities

Do you also get excited about animal sounds? Do you have 1) attention for detail and either 2a) some programming skills which you’d like to develop further, and/or 2b) excitement about doing fieldwork? Feel free to contact me. I supervise BSc and MSc students each year.

Education

PhD (cum laude) on wild zebra finch communication – Wageningen University & Macquarie University
MSc Biology – Wageningen University
BSc Biology (cum laude) – Leiden University