Modeling and Data Analysis in Movement Ecology

Movement ecology is a rapidly emerging new research field that explores the underlying mechanisms of organism movement, from animals, humans, to plant and microorganisms, across a range of environmental contexts and spatiotemporal scales, from individual behavior to population-level processes. Research in this area draws on a diverse range of disciplines including animal behavior, ecology, biology, geography, physics, mathematics, statistics, and computer science, and utilizes a range of techniques and technologies, including telemetry, remote sensing, and bioacoustics. Animal movements are determined by a combination of both innate individual characteristics and environmental factors, such as food availability, predation risk, and habitat quality. Movements can range from small-scale foraging excursions within a home-range to seasonal migrations over thousands of kilometers, with characteristic patterns at different spatial scales. Animal movement may affect reproductive success, genetic diversity, and disease transmission within populations, and can play a role in wider ecosystem functioning via nutrient cycling or dispersal of seeds and pollen. The rapid growth of movement ecology since the early 2000s has arguably been driven by the increased functionality, availability, and durability of modern biologgers and sensors enabling detailed data sets to be collected from a wide range of species. In turn, this has necessitated the development of new mathematical, statistical, and computational methods for modeling and analyzing these rich, and increasingly very large, data sets. In its broadest sense, movement ecology encompasses a wide-ranging set of concepts, theories, and practical approaches that relate to animal movement. Rather than attempting to cover the entire field, this bibliography specifically focuses on recent developments in modeling and analysis of the most common type of animal movement data, namely (x,y) or (x,y,z) positional data, as collected directly or indirectly over time by spatial tracking systems such as GPS or radio telemetry. Data collected in other forms such as via mark-recapture studies is beyond our scope (although still an important approach within the field). The bibliography highlights the key Movement Ecology Textbooks in the field, explores key Movement Ecology Concepts, and explains methods for Movement Data Collection and Processing and dealing with Circular Statistics. The article gives an overview of Random Walk Models of Movement and how they relate to Movement Path Analysis and Metrics and Statistical Model Fitting of Movement Data in this context. It focuses on several key applications: Foraging and Search, Home-Range, Habitat Space-Use and Resource Selection, and Collective Movement, and finishes with a summary of recent R Packages for Movement Ecology.