Inching Toward Movement Ecology

摘要

For centuries, researchers have sought to understand when, why, and how various species crawl, swim, fly, float, or hoof it to new locales. That work has led to maps of migration routes and details about dispersals. But few biologists have tried to fit these data into a big picture of movement in general, says Ran Nathan of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Under the auspices of a new discipline called "movement ecology," he and others are beginning to derive testable hypotheses about the mobile behaviors of animals, microbes, and even the seeds of plants. Their goal is to join empirical work to theories and to build models that fill in gaps in our understanding of movement—be it over millimeters or continents or by groups or individuals—in the natural world.