AMoveE 2014: William Fagan
Channel: Movebank
Date: 20/05/2014

This talk was presented by William Fagan on 7 May 2014 as part of the Symposium on Animal Movement and the Environment, held at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

Fagan WF, Bewick S, Cantrell S, Cosner C, 2014, "Information gathering and movement in dynamic landscapes"

Abstract: Real landscapes are dynamic in space and time, and the scale over which such variation occurs can determine the success of different strategies of population growth and movement. Real species rely on a variety of individual-level behaviors to move in and navigate through their landscapes. One such behavior is 'oriented movement' in which animals move in response to cues that occur within their perceptual range.
Inputs from many different sensory modalities determine the extent of perceptual ranges, which represent the spatial extent of the region from which animals can acquire information about their surroundings. From behavioral studies, we know that such information, which might include such sources as vocalizations from conspecifics or visual detection of resources, can have a strong influence on movement.
Here I will present original results from investigations of a spatially explicit mathematical model in which we use integrodifferential equations to represent non-local information gathering. In this set-up, the balance between population growth and decay hinges upon the degree of match (or mismatch) between an animal's perceptual range and the critical spatial scales of its landscape. Such integrodifferential models are intriguing in this context because they provide a reasonable approximation to the underlying biology but represent a substantial departure from the assumptions and structure of the kinds of mathematical models most commonly used to study animal movement.