Articles

Is pre-breeding prospecting behaviour affected by snow cover in the irruptive snowy owl? A test using state-space modelling and environmental data annotated via Movebank

Tracking individual animals using satellite telemetry has improved our understanding of animal movements considerably. Nonetheless, thorough statistical treatment of Argos datasets is often jeopardized by thei...

Authors: Jean-François Therrien, David Pinaud, Gilles Gauthier, Nicolas Lecomte, Keith L Bildstein and Joël Bety

AcceleRater: a web application for supervised learning of behavioral modes from acceleration measurements

The study of animal movement is experiencing rapid progress in recent years, forcefully driven by technological advancement. Biologgers with Acceleration (ACC) recordings are becoming increasingly popular in t...

Authors: Yehezkel S Resheff, Shay Rotics, Roi Harel, Orr Spiegel and Ran Nathan

Adding structure to land cover – using fractional cover to study animal habitat use

Linking animal movements to landscape features is critical to identify factors that shape the spatial behaviour of animals. Habitat selection is led by behavioural decisions and is shaped by the environment, t...

Authors: Mirjana Bevanda, Ned Horning, Bjoern Reineking, Marco Heurich, Martin Wegmann and Joerg Mueller

Daily activity budgets reveal a quasi-flightless stage during non-breeding in Hawaiian albatrosses

Animals adjust activity budgets as competing demands for limited time and energy shift across life history phases. For far-ranging migrants and especially pelagic seabirds, activity during breeding and migrati...

Authors: Sarah E Gutowsky, Lee FG Gutowsky, Ian D Jonsen, Marty L Leonard, Maura B Naughton, Marc D Romano and Scott A Shaffer

Seasonal migrations of North Atlantic minke whales: novel insights from large-scale passive acoustic monitoring networks

Little is known about migration patterns and seasonal distribution away from coastal summer feeding habitats of many pelagic baleen whales. Recently, large-scale passive acoustic monitoring networks have becom...

Authors: Denise Risch, Manuel Castellote, Christopher W Clark, Genevieve E Davis, Peter J Dugan, Lynne EW Hodge, Anurag Kumar, Klaus Lucke, David K Mellinger, Sharon L Nieukirk, Cristian Marian Popescu, Christian Ramp, Andrew J Read, Aaron N Rice, Monica A Silva, Ursula Siebert…

On the duality between interaction responses and mutual positions in flocking and schooling

Recent research in animal behaviour has contributed to determine how alignment, turning responses, and changes of speed mediate flocking and schooling interactions in different animal species. Here, we propose...

Authors: Andrea Perna, Guillaume Grégoire and Richard P Mann

When to be discrete: the importance of time formulation in understanding animal movement

Animal movement is essential to our understanding of population dynamics, animal behavior, and the impacts of global change. Coupled with high-resolution biotelemetry data, exciting new inferences about animal...

Authors: Brett T McClintock, Devin S Johnson, Mevin B Hooten, Jay M Ver Hoef and Juan M Morales

Windscapes shape seabird instantaneous energy costs but adult behavior buffers impact on offspring

Windscapes affect energy costs for flying animals, but animals can adjust their behavior to accommodate wind-induced energy costs. Theory predicts that flying animals should decrease air speed to compensate fo...

Authors: Kyle Hamish Elliott, Lorraine S Chivers, Lauren Bessey, Anthony J Gaston, Scott A Hatch, Akiko Kato, Orla Osborne, Yan Ropert-Coudert, John R Speakman and James F Hare

Consequences of animal interactions on their dynamics: emergence of home ranges and territoriality

Animal spacing has important implications for population abundance, species demography and the environment. Mechanisms underlying spatial segregation have their roots in the characteristics of the animals, the...

Authors: Luca Giuggioli and V M Kenkre

Correction: Secondary dispersal driven by overland flow in drylands: Review and mechanistic model development

Authors: Sally E Thompson, Shmuel Assouline, Li Chen, Ana Trakhtenbrot, Tal Svoray and Gabriel Katul

Detecting changes in the annual movements of terrestrial migratory species: using the first-passage time to document the spring migration of caribou

Migratory species face numerous threats related to human encroachment and climate change. Several migratory populations are declining and individuals are losing their migratory behaviour. To understand how hab...

Authors: Mael Le Corre, Christian Dussault and Steeve D Côté

Space, time and complexity in plant dispersal ecology

Dispersal of pollen and seeds are essential functions of plant species, with far-reaching demographic, ecological and evolutionary consequences. Interest in plant dispersal has increased with concerns about th...

Authors: Juan J Robledo-Arnuncio, Etienne K Klein, Helene C Muller-Landau and Luis Santamaría

Habitat selection during ungulate dispersal and exploratory movement at broad and fine scale with implications for conservation management

Dispersal has a critical influence on demography and gene flow and as such maintaining connectivity between populations is an essential element of modern conservation. Advances in satellite radiotelemetry are ...

Authors: Joshua Killeen, Henrik Thurfjell, Simone Ciuti, Dale Paton, Marco Musiani and Mark S Boyce

The pros and cons of applying the movement ecology paradigm for studying animal dispersal

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...

Authors: Michel Baguette, Virginie M Stevens and Jean Clobert

What seeds tell us about birds: a multi-year analysis of acorn woodpecker foraging movements

Foraging movements of animals shape their efficiency in finding food and their exposure to the environment while doing so. Our goal was to test the optimal foraging theory prediction that territorial acorn woo...

Authors: Pamela G Thompson, Peter E Smouse, Douglas G Scofield and Victoria L Sork

Copycat dynamics in leaderless animal group navigation

Many animals are known to have improved navigational efficiency when moving together as a social group. One potential mechanism for social group navigation is known as the ‘many wrongs principle’, where inform...

Authors: Edward A Codling and Nikolai WF Bode

Cues, strategies, and outcomes: how migrating vertebrates track environmental change

Authors: David W Winkler, Christian Jørgensen, Christiaan Both, Alasdair I Houston, John M McNamara, Douglas J Levey, Jesko Partecke, Adam Fudickar, Alex Kacelnik, David Roshier and Theunis Piersma

Continental-scale radar monitoring of the aerial movements of animals

Billions of organisms travel through the air, influencing population dynamics, community interactions, ecosystem services and our lives in many different ways. Yet monitoring these movements are technically ve...

Authors: Judy Shamoun-Baranes, Jose A Alves, Silke Bauer, Adriaan M Dokter, Ommo Hüppop, Jarmo Koistinen, Hidde Leijnse, Felix Liechti, Hans van Gasteren and Jason W Chapman

Coupling instantaneous energy-budget models and behavioural mode analysis to estimate optimal foraging strategy: an example with wandering albatrosses

How foragers move across the landscape to search for resources and obtain energy is a central issue in ecology. Direct energetic quantification of animal movements allows for testing optimal foraging theory pr...

Authors: Maite Louzao, Thorsten Wiegand, Frederic Bartumeus and Henri Weimerskirch

Secondary dispersal driven by overland flow in drylands: Review and mechanistic model development

Seed dispersal alters gene flow, reproduction, migration and ultimately spatial organization of dryland ecosystems. Because many seeds in drylands lack adaptations for long-distance dispersal, seed transport b...

Authors: Sally E Thompson, Shmuel Assouline, Li Chen, Ana Trahktenbrot, Tal Svoray and Gabriel G Katul

Optimizing acceleration-based ethograms: the use of variable-time versus fixed-time segmentation

Animal-borne accelerometers measure body orientation and movement and can thus be used to classify animal behaviour. To univocally and automatically analyse the large volume of data generated, we need classifi...

Authors: Roeland A Bom, Willem Bouten, Theunis Piersma, Kees Oosterbeek and Jan A van Gils

Bivariate Gaussian bridges: directional factorization of diffusion in Brownian bridge models

In recent years high resolution animal tracking data has become the standard in movement ecology. The Brownian Bridge Movement Model (BBMM) is a widely adopted approach to describe animal space use from such h...

Authors: Bart Kranstauber, Kamran Safi and Frederic Bartumeus

Applications of step-selection functions in ecology and conservation

Recent progress in positioning technology facilitates the collection of massive amounts of sequential spatial data on animals. This has led to new opportunities and challenges when investigating animal movemen...

Authors: Henrik Thurfjell, Simone Ciuti and Mark S Boyce

Navigation outside of the box: what the lab can learn from the field and what the field can learn from the lab

Space is continuous. But the communities of researchers that study the cognitive map in non-humans are strangely divided, with debate over its existence found among behaviorists but not neuroscientists. To rec...

Authors: Lucia F Jacobs and Randolf Menzel

Elephant movement closely tracks precipitation-driven vegetation dynamics in a Kenyan forest-savanna landscape

This study investigates the ranging behavior of elephants in relation to precipitation-driven dynamics of vegetation. Movement data were acquired for five bachelors and five female family herds during three ye...

Authors: Gil Bohrer, Pieter SA Beck, Shadrack M Ngene, Andrew K Skidmore and Ian Douglas-Hamilton

Transient windows for connectivity in a changing world

The primary focus of studies examining metapopulation processes in dynamic or disturbance-dependent landscapes has been related to spatiotemporal changes in the habitat patches themselves. However, like the ha...

Authors: Sara L Zeigler and William F Fagan

Cereal aphid movement: general principles and simulation modelling

Cereal aphids continue to be an important agricultural pest, with complex lifecycle and dispersal behaviours. Spatially-explicit models that are able to simulate flight initiation, movement direction, distance...

Authors: Hazel R Parry

Using diel movement behavior to infer foraging strategies related to ecological and social factors in elephants

Adaptive movement behaviors allow individuals to respond to fluctuations in resource quality and distribution in order to maintain fitness. Classically, studies of the interaction between ecological conditions...

Authors: Leo Polansky, Iain Douglas-Hamilton and George Wittemyer

Evaluating the intersection of a regional wildlife connectivity network with highways

Reliable predictions of regional-scale population connectivity are needed to prioritize conservation actions. However, there have been few examples of regional connectivity models that are empirically derived ...

Authors: Samuel A Cushman, Jesse S Lewis and Erin L Landguth

Pelagic movements of pacific leatherback turtles (dermochelys coriacea) highlight the role of prey and ocean currents

Leatherback turtles are renowned for their trans-oceanic migrations. However, despite numerous movement studies, the precise drivers of movement patterns in leatherbacks remain elusive. Many previous studies o...

Authors: Robert S Schick, Jason J Roberts, Scott A Eckert, Patrick N Halpin, Helen Bailey, Fei Chai, Lei Shi and James S Clark

Dispersal in a changing world: opportunities, insights and challenges

It has been long recognised that dispersal is an important life-history trait that plays a key role in the demography and evolution of populations and species. This then suggests that dispersal play a central ...

Authors: Sylvie VM Tesson and Pim Edelaar

The Lévy flight foraging hypothesis: forgetting about memory may lead to false verification of Brownian motion

The Lévy flight foraging hypothesis predicts a transition from scale-free Lévy walk (LW) to scale-specific Brownian motion (BM) as an animal moves from resource-poor towards resource-rich environment. However,...

Authors: Arild O Gautestad and Atle Mysterud

Movement patterns of an arboreal marsupial at the edge of its range: a case study of the koala

Conservation strategies derived from research carried out in one part of the range of a widely distributed species and then uniformly applied over multiple regions risk being ineffective due to regional variat...

Authors: Nicole Davies, Galina Gramotnev, Leonie Seabrook, Adrian Bradley, Greg Baxter, Jonathan Rhodes, Daniel Lunney and Clive McAlpine

Methods for assessment of short-term coral reef fish movements within an acoustic array

Arrays of passive receivers are a widely used tool for tracking the movements of acoustically-tagged fish in marine ecosystems; however, the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of coral reef environments pose c...

Authors: Nicholas A Farmer, Jerald S Ault, Steven G Smith and Erik C Franklin

Integrating movement ecology with biodiversity research - exploring new avenues to address spatiotemporal biodiversity dynamics

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 ou...

Authors: Florian Jeltsch, Dries Bonte, Guy Pe'er, Björn Reineking, Peter Leimgruber, Niko Balkenhol, Boris Schröder, Carsten M Buchmann, Thomas Mueller, Niels Blaum, Damaris Zurell, Katrin Böhning-Gaese, Thorsten Wiegand, Jana A Eccard, Heribert Hofer, Jette Reeg…

Mixed strategies of griffon vultures’ (Gyps fulvus) response to food deprivation lead to a hump-shaped movement pattern

The need to obtain food is a critical proximate driver of an organism’s movement that shapes the foraging and survival of individual animals. Consequently, the relationship between hunger and foraging has rece...

Authors: Orr Spiegel, Roi Harel, Wayne M Getz and Ran Nathan

Flying with the wind: scale dependency of speed and direction measurements in modelling wind support in avian flight

Understanding how environmental conditions, especially wind, influence birds' flight speeds is a prerequisite for understanding many important aspects of bird flight, including optimal migration strategies, na...

Authors: Kamran Safi, Bart Kranstauber, Rolf Weinzierl, Larry Griffin, Eileen C Rees, David Cabot, Sebastian Cruz, Carolina Proaño, John Y Takekawa, Scott H Newman, Jonas Waldenström, Daniel Bengtsson, Roland Kays, Martin Wikelski and Gil Bohrer

The environmental-data automated track annotation (Env-DATA) system: linking animal tracks with environmental data

The movement of animals is strongly influenced by external factors in their surrounding environment such as weather, habitat types, and human land use. With advances in positioning and sensor technologies, it ...

Authors: Somayeh Dodge, Gil Bohrer, Rolf Weinzierl, Sarah C Davidson, Roland Kays, David Douglas, Sebastian Cruz, Jiawei Han, David Brandes and Martin Wikelski

Home range plus: a space-time characterization of movement over real landscapes

Advances in GPS technology have created both opportunities in ecology as well as a need for analytical tools that can deal with the growing volume of data and ancillary variables associated with each location.

Authors: Andrew J Lyons, Wendy C Turner and Wayne M Getz

A milestone for movement ecology research

Authors: Ran Nathan and Luca Giuggioli