What is movement ecology?

Movement of individual organisms is fundamental to life and quilts our planet with a diversity of landscapes. Organisms move in a variety of ways, either actively or passively, within a home range or migrating to new areas, driven by processes acting across different spatial and temporal scales. These movements—traditionally classified into distinct types such as foraging, dispersal and migration—play a major role in determining the fate of individuals and the structure and dynamics of populations, communities and ecosystems. Organism movement research is therefore central to our understanding of how ecological systems work, and consequently has critically important implications for human life. Yet, despite the growing recognition of the importance of organism movement and the considerable advances in quantifying movement, the field lacks a general, unifying theory that facilitates our understanding of movement processes and the spatiotemporal patterns they create. Here we propose to introduce Movement Ecology, as an identified subfield of Biology, to stimulate the development of general theories that integrate across gaps maintained by the current separation of research efforts with respect to modes of movement and types of organisms. In this talk we shall highlight the main features of a new theory of Movement Ecology currently being developed by a multidisciplinary group of scientists—the core of this symposium—under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem.