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A unifying framework for quantifying the nature of animal interactions
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- Author(s) / Creator(s)
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Collective phenomena, whereby agent –agent interactions determine spatial
patterns, are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. On the other hand, movement
and space use are also greatly influenced by the interactions between animals
and their environment. Despite both types of interaction fundamentally influencing animal behaviour, there has hitherto been no unifying framework for
the models proposed in both areas. Here, we construct a general method
for inferring population-level spatial patterns from underlying individual
movement and interaction processes, a key ingredient in building a statistical
mechanics for ecological systems. We show that resource selection functions,
as well as several examples of collective motion models, arise as special
cases of our framework, thus bringing together resource selection analysis
and collective animal behaviour into a single theory. In particular, we focus
on combining the various mechanistic models of territorial interactions in
the literature with step selection functions, by incorporating interactions into
the step selection framework and demonstrating how to derive territorial patterns from the resulting models. We demonstrate the efficacy of our model by
application to a population of insectivore birds in the Amazon rainforest -
- Date created
- 2014-01-01
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Type of Item
- Article (Published)