"Interactions Between Animal Movement, Distribution and Population Dynamics"

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Spatiotemporal variation in the distribution of organisms is one of the primary mechanisms underlying evolutionary and ecological processes. Such dynamics, however, are not only of interest to theoreticians. Many of our most contemporary challenges in applied ecology are a product of the contraction and expansion of populations and communities. Climate change, habitat modification, and the assisted migration of species will ultimately redistribute populations in both positive and negative ways. Understanding the spatiotemporal responses of these organisms to environmental heterogeneity, including human-caused change, is essential for effective conservation and management. Within the next Discovery Grant period, I will explore the mechanisms and consequences of animal movement with a particular focus on the interactions with population abundance. Working with two model systems, I will investigate scales of movement that span the spatiotemporal extent of processes influencing population dynamics. At the finest scale, we will study spatially mediated changes in behaviour of individual barren-ground caribou, as reflected by observed variation in movement, that may offer fitness advantages and ultimately dictate population density. At a broader spatiotemporal scale, we will study the linkages between the movement ecology of individual tailed frogs, their survival, the annual distribution of populations, and the structure and interchange of individuals across multiple populations. Findings of this research will have immediate application to the management and conservation of caribou and tailed frogs in light of environmental perturbations. More broadly, this research will contribute to the emerging synthesis discipline of spatial ecology, which integrates theory and methods from animal behaviour, conservation biology, landscape and evolutionary ecology, and biogeography.