Ecological systems are rarely well-mixed: how movement behavior determines spatial structure and shapes ecological processes

Understanding spatially explicit population dynamics is a deep and enduring challenge in ecology. A large body of existing ecological theory, from species interaction to disease transmission, relies on very strong and unrealistic assumptions about the way individuals move and get to interact with each other and with the environment. Specifically, several models assume that individuals behave like the molecules of an ideal gas: following completely random trajectories through the entire area occupied by the population and only interacting with each other when their trajectories intersect. In this presentation, I will first discuss how traditional population dynamics models emerge from ideal gas assumptions. Then, I will present our ongoing research to refine those models so they incorporate movement features observed in GPS tracking data. I will discuss examples covering both the development of new theory (based on interacting particle systems and their continuous approximations) and its application to ecological data.



presential in seminar room, zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89064738226?pwd=yAHQ7NSEjD1tisy2fdexBMiW1DaV1S.1