Dr Thomas Luypaert

I am a tropical forest ecologist specializing in biodiversity monitoring technologies and working at the intersection of field ecology and data science. I have conducted fieldwork across tropical and subtropical forests, including Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Nepal, and the Brazilian Amazon. Currently, I work as a postdoctoral researcher at the at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, working on the Amazon Biodiversity and Carbon Expeditions (ABC Expeditions) - one of the largest biodiversity sampling initiatives ever undertaken in the Amazon. My research integrates traditional ecological methods with advanced tools such as environmental DNA (eDNA), camera traps, ecoacoustics, and machine vision to develop scalable approaches for monitoring large vertebrates in tropical rainforests. This includes designing analytical pipelines for processing big acoustic data, developing machine vision algorithms for camera trap imagery, and identifying research gaps in Brazilian eDNA databases. I also use these tools to investigate the impacts of human activities on biodiversity, including how habitat fragmentation shapes tropical forest soundscapes.