Department of Fisheries, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK 99775, USA.
Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2018 May 19;373(1746). doi: 10.1098/rstb.2017.0004.
Recent advances in technology and quantitative methods have led to the emergence of a new field of study that stands to link insights of researchers from two closely related, but often disconnected disciplines: movement ecology and collective animal behaviour. To date, the field of movement ecology has focused on elucidating the internal and external drivers of animal movement and the influence of movement on broader ecological processes. Typically, tracking and/or remote sensing technology is employed to study individual animals in natural conditions. By contrast, the field of collective behaviour has quantified the significant role social interactions play in the decision-making of animals within groups and, to date, has predominantly relied on controlled laboratory-based studies and theoretical models owing to the constraints of studying interacting animals in the field. This themed issue is intended to formalize the burgeoning field of collective movement ecology which integrates research from both movement ecology and collective behaviour. In this introductory paper, we set the stage for the issue by briefly examining the approaches and current status of research in these areas. Next, we outline the structure of the theme issue and describe the obstacles collective movement researchers face, from data acquisition in the field to analysis and problems of scale, and highlight the key contributions of the assembled papers. We finish by presenting research that links individual and broad-scale ecological and evolutionary processes to collective movement, and finally relate these concepts to emerging challenges for the management and conservation of animals on the move in a world that is increasingly impacted by human activity.This article is part of the theme issue 'Collective movement ecology'.
技术和定量方法的最新进展催生了一个新的研究领域，该领域有望将两个密切相关但通常相互脱节的学科——运动生态学和群体动物行为学——的研究人员的见解联系起来。迄今为止，运动生态学领域一直专注于阐明动物运动的内部和外部驱动因素，以及运动对更广泛的生态过程的影响。通常，跟踪和/或遥感技术被用于在自然条件下研究单个动物。相比之下，群体行为学领域已经量化了社会互动在动物群体内部决策中的重要作用，并且由于在野外研究相互作用的动物存在限制，迄今为止主要依赖于基于受控实验室的研究和理论模型。本期特刊旨在将运动生态学和群体行为学的研究整合起来，正式确立新兴的群体运动生态学领域。在本文中，我们通过简要检查这些领域的研究方法和现状，为本期特刊奠定了基础。接下来，我们概述了特刊的结构，并描述了群体运动研究人员面临的障碍，从野外的数据获取到分析和规模问题，并强调了所收集论文的关键贡献。最后，我们展示了将个体和广泛的生态和进化过程与群体运动联系起来的研究，并最终将这些概念与在日益受到人类活动影响的世界中管理和保护迁移动物所面临的新兴挑战联系起来。本文是“群体运动生态学”主题特刊的一部分。
