Movement Mondays

Bo Zhang: Oct 6th 

Consequences of movement in heterogeneous environments

Oklahoma State University

Summary: Movement is a fundamental ecological process that shapes how species respond and adapt to changing environments. In this talk, I will present three studies conducted across scales, from regional populations to continental landscapes. First, I will introduce how species with different locomotion rates respond differently to fragmentation. We combined mechanistic mathematical modeling and laboratory experiments to compare how species with different locomotion rates were affected by low (∼80% intact) and high (∼30% intact) levels of habitat loss. We found that only species with low rates of locomotion declined significantly in abundance as fragmentation increased in areas with low and high levels of habitat loss. In the second study, we studied the role of intraspecific variation in the ongoing range shift of green treefrogs (Hyla cinerea) in response to climate change. We found that individuals from newly colonized populations had longer leg lengths compared to their historical counterparts, suggesting that dispersal-related traits may facilitate range shifts. Additionally, we observed that population-level SDMs achieved higher predictive accuracy than species-level SDMs, underscoring the value of accounting for within-species variation. Finally, I will introduce a recent study on the growing risk of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) exposure in U.S. poultry farms. By integrating HPAI outbreak records in poultry, detections in wild birds, and citizen-reported wild bird encounter rates, we found that outbreaks were strongly associated with higher encounter rates. Alarmingly, our projections indicate that more than 45% of poultry farms face increasing exposure risk—rising above 60% under scenarios of high emissions and fragmented development.