A unifying framework for quantifying the nature of animal interactions

Abstract

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 incorporate 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.

References in corpus (3)

• Interaction Ruling Animal Collective Behaviour Depends on Topological rather than Metric Distance: Evidence from a Field Study
• Hierarchical group dynamics in pigeon flocks
• Step selection techniques uncover the environmental predictors of space use patterns in flocks of Amazonian birds

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Topological Data Analysis of Biological Aggregation Models
• Spatial memory and taxis-driven pattern formation in model ecosystems
• Biological Modelling with Nonlocal Advection Diffusion Equations
• Metrics for describing dyadic movement: a review
• Territorial pattern formation in the absence of an attractive potential
• A generalized residual technique for analyzing complex movement models using earth mover's distance
• A mathematical approach to territorial pattern formation
• Dynamic Models of Animal Movement with Spatial Point Process Interactions
• Integrated step selection analysis: bridging the gap between resource selection and animal movement
• Anomalous Diffusion and Emergent Universality in Coupled Memory-Driven Systems