High-resolution non-invasive animal tracking and reconstruction of local environment in aquatic ecosystems

摘要

Understanding the movement and behaviour of animals in their natural habitats is the ultimate goal of behavioural and movement ecology. By situating our studies in the natural world, we have the potential to uncover processes of selection acting on behaviour in natural populations. The ongoing advance of animal tracking and biologging brings the opportunity to revolutionize not only the scale of data collected from wild systems, but also the types of questions that can subsequently be answered. Incorporating geographical data has already given insights, for example, into the homing behaviour of reef fish, migratory patterns of birds, or the breeding site specificity of sea turtles [1–3]. Great advances in systems biology have further been made through the study of movement ecology, for example understanding the decision-making processes at play within primate groups manoeuvring through difficult terrain or the collective sensing of birds traversing their physical environment [4, 5]. Unravelling these aspects of animal movement can vastly improve management strategies [6, 7], for example in the creation of protected areas that incorporate bird migratory routes [8] or by reducing by-catch with dynamic habitat usage models of marine turtles [9].