"Interactions Between Animal Movement, Distribution and Population Dynamics"

生物体分布的时空变化是进化和生态过程的主要机制之一。然而，这种动力学并不只是理论家感兴趣的。我们在应用生态学领域面临的许多最当代的挑战都是人口和社区收缩和扩大的产物。气候变化、生境改变和物种的辅助迁徙最终将以积极和消极的方式重新分配种群。了解这些生物对环境异质性，包括人类造成的变化的时空反应，对于有效的保护和管理至关重要。 在接下来的探索资助期内，我将探索动物迁徙的机制和后果，特别关注与种群丰度的相互作用。通过使用两个模型系统，我将研究跨越影响人口动态的过程的时空范围的移动尺度。在最精细的尺度上，我们将研究个体在空间上调节的驯鹿行为的变化，正如观察到的运动变化所反映的那样，这可能提供健康优势并最终决定种群密度。在更广泛的时空尺度上，我们将研究个体尾蛙的运动生态、它们的生存、种群的年度分布以及多个种群中个体的结构和交换之间的联系。 这项研究的结果将立即应用于驯鹿和尾蛙的管理和保护，以应对环境扰动。更广泛地说，这项研究将有助于空间生态学这一新兴的综合学科的发展，该学科融合了动物行为学、保护生物学、景观与进化生态学和生物地理学的理论和方法。

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.