The predictive ability of classifications of movement, and a retrospective and prospective look at lessons to be learned from how we study movement

Ecologists have been creative at deriving classifications of individual-level and population-level movement. However most such classifications are either driven by thinking about a particular group of organisms, such as animal behavior, or they do not deal with environmentally-vectored movements as well as locomotory movements. I will present a framework for analyzing individual movement developed by the movement ecology group, and use this framework to test the ability of different organizational levels to capture quantitative differences in movement ecology. Analyses are based on a large literature survey and results from this survey are also used to describe how we commonly characterize movement, allowing important gaps to be identified. To prevent bias in identifying studies we selected 10 journals in different areas of ecology and looked at publications over a 10 year period. The result of using the framework is a much broader and greatly simplified way of looking at movement, rather than the ecology of special cases that exists at present. A major and largely unresolved problem is how to scale movements of different kinds of organisms so that they can be compared. The analysis of individual movement patterns suggests some similarities among what have been classically considered as very different kinds of movement. Frequently existing studies of movement and dispersal report data in a way that is far from general and important facets of the movement process are missing. This exercise helps to identify some of the missing information that we should seek to measure.