Journal of Animal Ecology, 85(1): 5-84.
Edited by Bram Van Moorter, Manuela Panzacchi, Francesca Cagnacci and Mark S. Boyce
Metabolism Special Feature Movements have long been identified as the glue linking individual behaviour to populations (Turchin 1998) and, ultimately, to species’ conservation and management. However, the field of movement ecology developed only recently, thanks to the rapidly increasing availability of both satellite tracking data of animal locations and of high-resolution environmental data layers. This led to a “perfect storm of opportunities” (Cagnacci et al. 2010) and to the rapid proliferation of a vast diversity of sophisticated analytical tools. However, for the classical schooled ecologists it has become increasingly challenging to find the most appropriate tool to answer a specific research question, and the current discourse in movement ecology is shifting in focus from the actual ecological questions to the analytical techniques to answer them. In conclusion, despite the great leap in the amount of information available, the way such information is used for ecology, management and conservation often falls short of its promises.
The motivation for this Special Feature is to refocus the discussions on key ecological questions in movement ecology and to provide guidelines for choosing the most appropriate analytical tools to answer them. The collection of 6 papers is the result of three years work starting from the summer of 2012, when we held a workshop in Evenstad, Norway, gathering lead scientists in movement ecology from Europe, America and Australia. The workshop was paralleled by a matching Summer School (International Research school for Applied Ecology, www.irsea.no), targeted at a broader audience. The Special Feature covers questions spanning from behavioral ecology to population dynamics, provides an overview of the state-of-the-art tools available to answer them, and proposes both theoretical and analytical advances to link individual movements to different kinds of spatially structured processes. In particular, GPS data are used to infer animal behavior (Guraire et al), migratory patterns (Cagnacci et al), identify the continuum between movement corridors and barriers (Panzacchi et al), quantify barrier permeability and proximity avoidance (Beyer et al), establish the link between individual movements, home range and habitat selection (Van Moorter et al), and scale up from habitat selection to population dynamics (Boyce et al) – as detailed in Borger et al. Online appendices allow the readers to access the codes and sample dataset needed to perform the analyses.
References
Turchin, P., 1998. Quantitative analysis of movement: measuring and modeling population redistribution in animals and plants. Sunderland: Sinauer Associates.
Cagnacci, F., Boitani, L., Powell, R.A. and Boyce, M.S., 2010. Animal ecology meets GPS-based radiotelemetry: a perfect storm of opportunities and challenges. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 365(1550), pp.2157-2162.