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      A movement ecology paradigm for unifying organismal movement research

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          Abstract

          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.

          ”Now we must consider in general the common reason for moving with any movement whatever.“ (Aristotle, De Motu Animalium , 4th century B.C.)

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          A framework for generating and analyzing movement paths on ecological landscapes.

          The movement paths of individuals over landscapes are basically represented by sequences of points (x(i), y(i)) occurring at times t(i). Theoretically, these points can be viewed as being generated by stochastic processes that in the simplest cases are Gaussian random walks on featureless landscapes. Generalizations have been made of walks that (i) take place on landscapes with features, (ii) have correlated distributions of velocity and direction of movement in each time interval, (iii) are Lévy processes in which distance or waiting-time (time-between steps) distributions have infinite moments, or (iv) have paths bounded in space and time. We begin by demonstrating that rather mild truncations of fat-tailed step-size distributions have a dramatic effect on dispersion of organisms, where such truncations naturally arise in real walks of organisms bounded by space and, more generally, influenced by the interactions of physiological, behavioral, and ecological factors with landscape features. These generalizations permit not only increased realism and hence greater accuracy in constructing movement pathways, but also provide a biogeographically detailed epistemological framework for interpreting movement patterns in all organisms, whether tossed in the wind or willfully driven. We illustrate the utility of our framework by demonstrating how fission-fusion herding behavior arises among individuals endeavoring to satisfy both nutritional and safety demands in heterogeneous environments. We conclude with a brief discussion of potential methods that can be used to solve the inverse problem of identifying putative causal factors driving movement behavior on known landscapes, leaving details to references in the literature.
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            Author and article information

            Journal
            Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
            Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
            Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
            0027-8424
            1091-6490
            December 09 2008
            December 09 2008
            December 09 2008
            : 105
            : 49
            : 19052-19059
            Affiliations
            [1 ]Movement Ecology Laboratory, Department of Evolution, Systematics and Ecology, Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel;
            [2 ]Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720;
            [3 ]Department of Conservation Biology, Estación Biológica de Doñana, Spanish Council for Scientific Research CSIC, E-41013 Seville, Spain;
            [4 ]Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, CA 95616;
            [5 ]Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Sede Boqer Campus, 84990 Israel; and
            [6 ]Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
            Article
            10.1073/pnas.0800375105
            2614714
            19060196
            e8fbb911-d78b-420f-9720-b912f2bd9f42
            © 2008
            History

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