Speaker
Description
Animals move in order to track resources and suitable habitats for their survival. In turn, animal movement promotes ecosystem stability and its functions, generating large scale biodiversity patterns. Animals, and all of us, make decisions on where to go and how to get there, evaluating the optimal travel paths more or less sub-consciously. Perhaps the most clear factor influencing movement decisions is how much effort, or energy, we have to spend to get where we want to go. Energy is the currency of life, with individuals striving to optimize energy costs and gains to maximize their fitness. Therefore, animals should minimise the energetic costs of moving, determining how they use the landscape and affect the environment. Yet, our understanding of how animals optimise their movement strategies remains limited.
Our understanding of the importance of energy landscapes for terrestrial animal movement has been limited by the lack of a scalable framework to quantify energy costs of travelling and by data availability. These limitations have been recently resolved: I developed a scalable framework (enerscape) to compute movement costs for terrestrial animals and massive amounts of animal telemetry data have been made publicly available (e.g., https://www.movebank.org/).
Here, I propose a new research project for investigating the impacts of energy costs on movement of terrestrial animals and how they use the landscape. Specifically, such research project will investigate:
- How terrestrial mammals respond to energy landscapes.
- How energy landscapes, resource availability, predation risk, and human pressure interact to influence animal decisions.
- The connectivity among European protected areas network from the perspective of energy landscapes.
- Tools and methodologies to support planned and future research.
In this poster, I illustrate such a research project and what it offers to the larger scientific and practitioners community.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
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