The field of movement ecology has experienced unprecedented growth in the last decade. Fundamental questions about movement can now be tackled thanks to the development of biologging devices (e.g. GPS) that allow tracking animals and humans. A decade ago, a framework was proposed for the study of movement ecology, as a first step for an integrative theory of organism movement (Nathan et al. 2008). This movement ecology framework (MEF) has been recognized in the literature as a milestone in the field. In this work, we thoroughly investigated the field, and summarized the successes and failures of Movement Ecology in the last decade. We reviewed more than 8000 movement ecology papers and 58 R packages using quantitative and computational approaches such as text mining and network analysis.
Results/Conclusions
Successes: In the last decade, there has been an increasing trend in the number of publications in movement ecology (from ~400 papers in 2008 to ~1100 in 2018), a diversity in the types of tracking devices with increasing use of high resolution technologies such as accelerometers and video cameras, and a proliferation of R packages specifically created to process and analyze movement data.
Failures: When analyzing the connections between R packages, we found a fragmentation in the community, with a third of the packages working in isolation, without any connection between each other. More fundamentally, we also show that we are still focusing on the same aspects of movement (external factors affecting movement, 77% of the papers) and neglecting the same aspects of movement (e.g. navigation, 9% of the papers) than a decade ago.
We will end the presentation with a discussion about the future of movement ecology, whether if technology will continue to be the driving force in the field, or if the field will rather transform, embrace the MEF and face the challenges of interdisciplinarity.