Energy landscapes shape animal movement ecology

Area of Science:

• Ecology
• Movement Ecology
• Bioenergetics

Background:

• Metabolic costs of animal movement are often studied in labs, which poorly represent natural environments.
• Energy landscapes, linking location to transport costs, can explain movement patterns due to environmental heterogeneity.
• Behavioral responses to energy landscapes are known but often studied at limited scales.

Purpose of the Study:

• To synthesize how environmental changes in transport costs affect animal movement behavior.
• To develop models for movement costs in heterogeneous environments.
• To predict how energy landscapes influence individual to population-level processes.

Main Methods:

• Synthesizing mechanisms of environmentally driven cost-of-transport changes.
• Developing example cost functions for heterogeneous environments.
• Presenting methods for visualizing energy landscapes.
• Deriving predictions for ecological processes.

Main Results:

• Animals adjust movement parameters (route, speed, timing, tortuosity) based on available energy savings.
• Movement costs influence habitat patch quality and drive nonrandom individual movements.
• Energy landscapes structure population and species-level processes, including gene flow.

Conclusions:

• Energy landscapes are crucial for understanding animal movement ecology across diverse habitats and scales.
• Animal-attached technology and GIS enable novel mapping and measurement of energy landscapes.
• Studying energy landscapes offers new insights into animal behavior and ecological dynamics.