Analysis of Individual Movement Data: What Can We Learn? Where Can We Go?

Thanks to technological advances in animal tracking, individual animal movement data are collected at an ever increasing rate. Data are also collected in diverse ways, at different scales and to address a diverse range of questions. There is, in consequence, a myriad of methods for the analysis of movement data, and biologists are often confounded by the choices among analytical tools. I will talk in general about the considerations that need to be taken into account when analyzing movement data (in particular questions of scale, measurement error, and behavioral and environmental heterogeneity), providing several examples of analysis on marine and terrestrial animals, all collected with different tools and different ecological questions in mind.  In each case, I will also attempt to address the greater question of: how large-scale ecological questions, such as population-level effects, dispersal, redistribution and invasion processes, be addressed using individual movement data.