Animal movement and emergent patterns of space use: a personal journey with plentiful references to Mark Lewis
How do animal movements, together with their interactions with each other and their environment, shape the space use of individuals, populations, and species? This has been perhaps the central question underlying much of my research so far. My journey started off with trying to understand the emergence of territorial patterns. A key book for understanding how to approach this question was "Mechanistic Home Range Analysis" by Paul Moorcroft and Mark Lewis. In reading this, there begun also my journey into understanding Mark's contribution to science. Through working as a postdoc in Mark's lab, and beyond, these initial questions of territoriality expanded to encompass many other topics, including landscape ecology, non-local advection-diffusion PDEs, and biological invasions. Yet the general question how space use patterns emerge from animal movements remained central. My talk will give a high-level overview of various topics that I have examined, progress made, and ponderings on future directions regarding this general question. Much of the work I will present was in collaboration with Mark Lewis, both during my time as a postdoc in his lab and afterwards. So, as well as detailing advances on an important scientific question, I hope to show some of the ways in which Mark has influenced the field through both his own work and inspiring new generations of researchers.