School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8SQ, UK
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2018 May 19;373(1746). doi: 10.1098/rstb.2017.0012.
A central question in ecology is how to link processes that occur over different scales. The daily interactions of individual organisms ultimately determine community dynamics, population fluctuations and the functioning of entire ecosystems. Observations of these multiscale ecological processes are constrained by various technological, biological or logistical issues, and there are often vast discrepancies between the scale at which observation is possible and the scale of the question of interest. Animal movement is characterized by processes that act over multiple spatial and temporal scales. Second-by-second decisions accumulate to produce annual movement patterns. Individuals influence, and are influenced by, collective movement decisions, which then govern the spatial distribution of populations and the connectivity of meta-populations. While the field of movement ecology is experiencing unprecedented growth in the availability of movement data, there remain challenges in integrating observations with questions of ecological interest. In this article, we present the major challenges of addressing these issues within the context of the Serengeti wildebeest migration, a keystone ecological phenomena that crosses multiple scales of space, time and biological complexity.This article is part of the theme issue 'Collective movement ecology'.
生态学中的一个核心问题是如何将不同尺度上发生的过程联系起来。个体生物的日常相互作用最终决定了群落动态、种群波动和整个生态系统的功能。这些多尺度生态过程的观测受到各种技术、生物或后勤问题的限制，并且观测可能的尺度和感兴趣的问题的尺度之间通常存在巨大差异。动物运动的特点是在多个时空尺度上发生的过程。秒级的决策积累起来产生了年度运动模式。个体影响和受到集体运动决策的影响，然后这些决策又决定了种群的空间分布和元种群的连通性。尽管运动生态学领域在运动数据的可用性方面正经历前所未有的增长，但在将观测与生态感兴趣的问题结合起来方面仍存在挑战。在本文中，我们将在塞伦盖蒂角马大迁徙的背景下提出解决这些问题的主要挑战，这是一个跨越空间、时间和生物复杂性多个尺度的关键生态现象。本文是“集体运动生态学”主题问题的一部分。
