The Development of an Animal Movement Paradigm

Animals move in diverse ways, from short foraging trips to seasonal trans-continental migrations, but common to all is that selection favours efficiency and prudent usage of energy, time and risk. The capacity to fly allow many animals to move fast and cost efficiently, although muscle-powered flight is the most strenuous physical activity found. Swimming is even more cost-effective than flight (if measured as the energy cost to move a unit body mass over unit distance), while walking/running is more expensive than flying. Also within these canonical locomotion modes there are different strategies; birds, for example, can fly either by flapping or soaring, and some spiders can walk locally or carried by a silky thread (balloon) for long distances. An animal on the move is assumed to interact with its environment and make movement decisions that result in different routes and behaviours. Information acquisition about the environment embraces the ecological context and the cues for navigation and orientation, dynamically interacting with the internal state of the animal. All in all, grasping the full complexity of animal movement requires combining tools, concepts and ideas across disciplines, making movement ecology a genuine trans-disciplinary field of research. The new field "movement ecology" has seen an enormous growth over the last decade. Previously, movement studies have been strongly divided to different taxonomic groups and/or movement phenomenon. Such division led to many insights, but concepts and tools are rarely shared among specific groups, and there is no common ground for developing general theories. This conference will serve as an inroad to theoretical, methodological and applied consequences of animal movements at all possible scales. A major focus will be the integration of theoretical frameworks hitherto applied to different animal groups, but where common grounds may cross-fertilize research in different systems. We will promote lectures where cross-over between movement using different modes of locomotion and between different scales of movement are made, and to encourage balanced contributions and integrative discussions.