Animal movement as a cross-cutting theme at CASUS

The movement of animals through landscapes worldwide drives ecological processes, influences disease transmission, and governs how humans and wildlife interact. High resolution animal tracking data have transformed our ability to understand when, where, how, and why animals move. However, these data come with formidable statistical challenges including strong autocorrelation and context-dependent location errors and fix rates. Overcoming these hurdles requires an interdisciplinary effort that combines ecology, physics, geostatistics, signal processing, and computer science.

In this talk, I detail ongoing work at CASUS in animal movement research, covering statistical methods and software development as well as applications in ecology, wildlife management, and autonomous vehicles research. I also highlight the role that aggregated, multispecies tracking datasets play in understanding animal movement and its consequences at the global scale. Finally, I discuss future directions for this research program, outlining potential points of collaboration with researchers coming from different disciplines.