A movement ecology paradigm for unifying organismal movement research (original) (raw)
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Trends and missing parts in the study of movement ecology
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008
Movement is important to all organisms, and accordingly it is addressed in a huge number of papers in the literature. Of nearly 26,000 papers referring to movement, an estimated 34% focused on movement by measuring it or testing hypotheses about it. This enormous amount of information is difficult to review and highlights the need to assess the collective completeness of movement studies and identify gaps. We surveyed 1,000 randomly selected papers from 496 journals and compared the facets of movement studied with a suggested framework for movement ecology, consisting of internal state (motivation, physiology), motion and navigation capacities, and external factors (both the physical environment and living organisms), and links among these components. Most studies simply measured and described the movement of organisms without reference to ecological or internal factors, and the most frequently studied part of the framework was the link between external factors and motion capacity. Few studies looked at the effects on movement of navigation capacity, or internal state, and those were mainly from vertebrates. For invertebrates and plants most studies were at the population level, whereas more vertebrate studies were conducted at the individual level. Consideration of only population-level averages promulgates neglect of between-individual variation in movement, potentially hindering the study of factors controlling movement. Terminology was found to be inconsistent among taxa and subdisciplines. The gaps identified in coverage of movement studies highlight research areas that should be addressed to fully understand the ecology of movement.
Movement of individual organisms is fundamental to life, quilting our planet in a rich tapestry of phenomena with diverse implications for ecosystems and humans. Movement research is both plentiful and insightful, and recent methodological advances facilitate obtaining a detailed view of individual movement. Yet, we lack a general unifying paradigm, derived from first principles, which can place movement studies within a common context and advance the development of a mature scientific discipline. This introductory article to the Movement Ecology Special Feature proposes a paradigm that integrates conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and empirical frameworks for studying movement of all organisms, from microbes to trees to elephants. We introduce a conceptual framework depicting the interplay among four basic mechanistic components of organismal movement: the internal state (why move?), motion (how to move?), and navigation (when and where to move?) capacities of the individual and the external factors affecting movement. We demonstrate how the proposed framework aids the study of various taxa and movement types; promotes the formulation of hypotheses about movement; and complements existing biomechanical, cognitive, random, and optimality paradigms of movement. The proposed framework integrates eclectic research on movement into a structured paradigm and aims at providing a basis for hypothesis generation and a vehicle facilitating the understanding of the causes, mechanisms, and spatiotemporal patterns of movement and their role in various ecological and evolutionary processes.
Integrating movement ecology with biodiversity research
2017
Movement of organisms is one of the key mechanisms shaping biodiversity, e.g. the distribution of genes, individuals and species in space and time. Recent technological and conceptual advances have improved our ability to assess the causes and consequences of individual movement, and led to the emergence of the new field of ‘movement ecology’. Here, we outline how movement ecology can contribute to the broad field of biodiversity research, i.e. the study of processes and patterns of life among and across different scales, from genes to ecosystems, and we propose a conceptual framework linking these hitherto largely separated fields of research. Our framework builds on the concept of movement ecology for individuals, and demonstrates its importance for linking individual organismal movement with biodiversity. First, organismal movements can provide ‘mobile links’ between habitats or ecosystems, thereby connecting resources, genes, and processes among otherwise separate locations. Und...
The pros and cons of applying the movement ecology paradigm for studying animal dispersal
Movement Ecology, 2014
Understanding how dispersal movements are motivated and executed is the core business of dispersal evolutionary ecology, which is an active research field in environmental sciences. However, recent advances in dispersal research have not yet been confronted to the movement ecology paradigm (MEP) that was introduced to unify the study of all types of movements of all organisms. Here we aim at doing this exercise to investigate if the MEP is sufficiently general to provide sound predictions on dispersal causes, modalities and consequences. We begin by briefly summarizing the main concepts of the MEP that are relevant to our analysis. A part of some examples, many studies focusing on animal movements share a common, two step procedures: (1) record movement paths, and test post-hoc functional assumptions to identify the relationships between the four basic components listed above. Then we present some important results from dispersal evolutionary ecology research. Next we turn to two groups of model organisms (butterflies and lizards), in which dispersal has been thoroughly studied in the field for decades. These organisms have contrasted dispersal modes: the causes of dispersal are mainly related to the social context in lizards, whereas they are mainly dependent on the environmental context in butterflies. Lizards disperse most often once in their life soon after birth, whereas butterflies generally disperse all over their adult life. We investigate if and how the MEP provides an added value to the study of dispersal on these organisms. Although the MEP is in principle encapsulates almost every variation acting on movement, its ability to incorporate variation in anything else than pure movement trajectories appears to be mixed: dispersal is extremely phenotype-and context-dependent, which rends difficult the use of the MEP as an operational tool to incorporate variation across individuals and situations. We propose that a mixed approach combining the Eulerian and Lagrangian viewpoints could deal with this high dispersal variability. We conclude by providing perspectives for the integration of ecological and evolutionary processes affecting dispersal into the MEP that could increase its efficiency to study dispersal.
EDITORIAL Stuck in motion? Reconnecting questions and tools in movement ecology
Journal of Animal Ecology, 2016
Is science mostly driven by novel ideas or by new tools?Whilst in certain areas of science or at specific times new ideas might have led to new understanding and even changed entire fields of research (e.g. Dyson 2012), for the field of movement ecology, ‘tools’ [tracking devices,computing power and statistical/mathematical methods,Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing data] have led to an ongoing revolutionary progress lasting many decades. There has been a down side,however, to this increasingly rapid development of new methods. It is becoming more and more challenging to match research questions with the appropriate tools, especially with the increasing availability of high-resolution animal movement data sets. Thus, discussions among ecologists often become entirely focussed around methodological aspects (Hebblewhite & Haydon 2010), losing track of the fact that it is the research questions that dictate the most appropriate sampling design and methods to use (Fieberg & Borger 2012).This Special Feature guest edited by Bram van Moorter, Manuela Panzacchi, Francesca Cagnacci and Mark S.Boyce aims to address this disconnect between research questions and tools in movement ecology. It arose from a workshop of the same name that took place in Hedmark University College in Norway (11–17 August, 2012) organized by the Guest Editors. All six papers of this Special Feature focus on an ecological question, ranging from the relationship between habitat selection and population abundance to the spatial partitioning of behaviours along the movement trajectory. One or more methodological approaches are discussed, their performances evaluated using simulated and/or real movement data, and documented software codes are provided to allow the readers to repeat all analyses.In this editorial for the Special Feature, I firstly briefly review the major milestones in tool development for movement ecology research, from the first mark–recapture techniques to the current techniques allowing users to collect high-frequency movement data and high-resolution environmental data, as well as the methods for statistical and mathematical analyses. I then briefly describe the methods covered in the Special Feature and conclude with a brief outlook on ongoing and future developments.
Understanding scales of movement: animals ride waves and ripples of environmental change
Journal of Animal Ecology, 2013
1. Animal movements are the primary behavioural adaptation to spatiotemporal heterogeneity in resource availability. Depending on their spatiotemporal scale, movements have been categorized into distinct functional groups (e.g. foraging movements, dispersal, migration), and have been studied using different methodologies. We suggest striving towards the development of a coherent framework based on the ultimate function of all movement types, which is to increase individual fitness through an optimal exploitation of resources varying in space and time. 2. We developed a novel approach to simultaneously study movements at different spatiotemporal scales based on the following proposed theory: the length and frequency of animal movements are determined by the interaction between temporal autocorrelation in resource availability and spatial autocorrelation in changes in resource availability. We hypothesized that for each time interval the spatiotemporal scales of moose Alces alces movements correspond to the spatiotemporal scales of variation in the gains derived from resource exploitation when taking into account the costs of movements (represented by their proxies, forage availability NDVI and snow depth respectively). The scales of change in NDVI and snow were quantified using wave theory, and were related to the scale of moose movement using linear mixed models. 3. In support of the proposed theory we found that frequent, smaller scale movements were triggered by fast, small-scale ripples of changes, whereas infrequent, larger scale movements matched slow, large-scale waves of change in resource availability. Similarly, moose inhabiting ranges characterized by larger scale waves of change in the onset of spring migrated longer distances. 4. We showed that the scales of movements are driven by the scales of changes in the net profitability of trophic resources. Our approach can be extended to include drivers of movements other than trophic resources (e.g. population density, density of related individuals, predation risk) and may facilitate the assessment of the impact of environmental changes on community dynamics and conservation.
Oikos
Animal movement strategies including migration, dispersal, nomadism, and residency are shaped by broad-scale spatialtemporal structuring of the environment, including factors such as the degrees of spatial variation, seasonality and interannual predictability. Animal movement strategies, in turn, interact with the characteristics of individuals and the local distribution of resources to determine local patterns of resource selection with complex and poorly understood implications for animal fitness. Here we present a multi-scale investigation of animal movement strategies and resource selection. We consider the degree to which spatial variation, seasonality, and inter-annual predictability in resources drive migration patterns among different taxa and how movement strategies in turn shape local resource selection patterns. We focus on adult Galapagos giant tortoises Chelonoidis spp. as a model system since they display many movement strategies and evolved in the absence of predators of adults. Specifically, our analysis is based on 63 individuals among four taxa tracked on three islands over six years and almost 10 6 tortoise re-locations. Tortoises displayed a continuum of movement strategies from migration to sedentarism that were linked to the spatio-temporal scale and predictability of resource distributions. Movement strategies shaped patterns of resource selection. Specifically, migratory individuals displayed stronger selection toward areas where resources were more predictable among years than did non-migratory individuals, which indicates a selective advantage for migrants in seasonally structured, more predictable environments. Our analytical framework combines large-scale predictions for movement strategies, based on environmental structuring, with finer-scale analysis of space-use. Integrating different organizational levels of analysis provides a deeper understanding of the eco-evolutionary dynamics at play in the emergence and maintenance of migration and the critical role of resource predictability. Our results highlight that assessing the potential benefits of differential behavioral responses first requires an understanding of the interactions among movement strategies, resource selection and individual characteristics.
The behavioural ecology of animal movement: reflections upon potential synergies
Animal movement acts at multiple scales: it can shape the destiny of individuals and populations, govern community and ecosystem structure, and influence evolutionary processes and patterns of biodiversity. Recent technological advances, such as the revolutionary developments in tracking technology and remote sensing, provide fresh insights and the possibility to collect detailed data on where and how animals travel through space, how they react to and/or interact with their environment and conspecifics as well as their predators and prey. Scientists from various disciplines ranging from physics to psychology develop and apply ever improving analytical techniques to observe, assess and archive animal movement across scales. As in any other field, standardising data collection is a key prerequisite in order to combine and extend dataset collections, many of which may further be utilized by behavioural ecologists to answer questions on the function and significance of animal movements. Large-scale manipulative experimental approaches have also shed new light on old questions in animal movement, and opened new and previously inaccessible perspectives to study animal movement in the context of behavioural ecology. Animal movements are intrinsic to all behavioural processes, and analysis of movement phenomena within the framework of behavioural ecology has provided rich insights into the mechanisms and functions of animal behavior for some decades. We convened an international symposium to reflect on the behavioural ecology of animal movement, asking how these two related disciplines can produce new insights and synergies. Our symposium provided a platform that brought together a diverse range of researchers working on animal movement on different taxa and a range of spatial scales to discuss how behavioural ecology can integrate with the nascent discipline of movement ecology. In this short paper we summarise the key points from this meeting, and call for a renewed focus on the behavioural processes involved in the movements of animals.