From vast herds of wildebeest thundering across the Serengeti to a malaria-laden mosquito silently stalking a human host, the movement of animals has effects that reverberate throughout the biosphere. The way that animals move governs many ecological interactions including predation, disease transmission, and human-wildlife conflict. Encounter rates, which quantify how often moving individuals come in contact with each other, serve as the “glue” that links movement behavior to ecological processes. While GPS devices have revolutionized the study of animal movement, research on encounter rates has not kept pace. A multidisciplinary research team consisting of ecologists and physicists has found that the gap between the data and how encounter is modeled could have serious consequences for certain ecological predictions.
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Source: Phys.org