Symposium on Animal Movement and the Environment

The Symposium on Animal Movement and the Environment was held 5–8 May 2014 at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, North Carolina. Check out the following materials from the meeting!

How do we quantify an animal’s environment?

With advances in animal tracking and remote sensing technology, we are quickly entering a new age of discovery about animal movement. A growing range of sensors allow us to collect more data on the movements and experiences of free-ranging animals of more species than ever before, with unparalleled resolution. At the same time, massive datasets describing the ever-changing world are available to quantify the conditions these animals are moving through. Scientists are rapidly developing new statistical methods and analysis tools to facilitate discoveries. The field is now moving into a new era where we are restricted less by the lack of data than by the challenges of fully exploring and discovering the information hidden in these datasets. The goal of this meeting is to help usher in this data-rich, Golden Age of Movement Ecology. Through presentations, tutorials, and working groups, we will learn how scientists are integrating information on animals and the environment to move beyond simply describing movements, to testing hypotheses about movement ecology and the relationship between animals and their changing environment.

This symposium is organized with support and cooperation from NASA, Movebank, the Max Plank Institute for Ornithology, the Ohio State University, North Carolina State University, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the Minerva Center for Movement Ecology and the journal Movement Ecology.