From footsteps to foraging; using movement models to understand animal behaviour

Predicting the impacts of environmental change on species requires a mechanistic understanding of biological processes such as foraging, migration, and reproduction. However, the continuous behavioural data needed to assess how these processes change through time is often impossible to gather, particularly for Arctic and marine species. Thus, ecologists increasingly rely on animal telemetry to monitor activity patterns. In this talk, I will demonstrate how emerging statistical methods and movement data can be used to model the behaviour of a range of species (e.g. polar bear, rhinoceros auklet), and discuss how the information provided by movement models can help us answer fundamental ecological questions and solve conservation problems.