Movement Mondays
Join us for invited seminar talks by world-leading scientists and informal research and technique-oriented talks by CAM members where we discuss our latest and greatest ideas!
Our next speaker:
Eric Pedersen: Oct 27th
Can we re-connect movement ecology with spatial population ecology?
Concordia University
Summary: Movement ecology is the study of how and why organisms move across landscapes, and spatial population ecology is the study of how spatially structured processes (including movement) affect the rate of change of populations across space and time. Both fields share common conceptual and historical roots: both assume that spatial heterogeneity in abiotic and biotic conditions affects the behaviour and fitness of organisms, and both use random walks to model individual and aggregate movement patterns. Given these deep connections, there is a surprisingly large communication gap between modern movement and spatial population ecologists, and novel findings and concepts rarely transfer between the two fields. In this talk, I will discuss what I think are two root causes of this divide: first, the mismatch in the scales of study designs and research questions, and second the Lagrangian-Eulerian communication gap: how do we translate movement behaviours estimated for individuals into estimates of average population change across space? I will also show recent work from in my lab aimed at bridging this divide, using models of individual movement to estimate spatial patch structures for metapopulation models.
