Movement of organisms is one of the key mechanisms determining individual responses to resources, environmental change and species interactions, patterns of changes in species’ traits and genetic diversity, and, ultimately, the distribution of biodiversity (Brose et al. 2004; Nathan et al. 2008). Movement is therefore fundamental for predicting human impact on biodiversity, e.g. in the context of changes in landscape configuration, habitat deterioration and climate change (Jeltsch et al. 2013). Recent technological advancements certainly provide big data on movement patterns of unprecedented quality, but a key challenge now is to make full use of such data with regard to better understanding and predicting biodiversity dynamics and how to make the outputs readily accessible and integrated, i.e. how to communicate them in an understandable way to conservation practitioners (Barton et al. 2015; Fraser et al. 2018). The importance of understanding the patterns and drivers of movement for effective conservation and management has been recognized (Katzner and Arlettaz 2020), there is, additionally, often a disjoint in aims and goals of researchers and managers in conservation science and movement ecology. We aim to tackle the gaps in understanding between aims of conservation practitioners and researchers, and in how science-based findings in movement ecology may refine decision-making and thus contribute to fulfilling conservation objectives. We therefore invite practitioners and scientists from both fields to a debate on joint and transdisciplinary approaches for effective conservation in the Anthropocene.

References

Barton et al. 2015. Guidelines for using movement science to inform biodiversity policy. Environmental management, 56(4), 791-801.

Brose et al. 2004. Unified spatial scaling of species and their trophic interactions. Nature, 428(6979), 167-171.

Fraser et al. 2018. Tracking the conservation promise of movement ecology. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 150.

Jeltsch et al. 2013. Integrating movement ecology with biodiversity research-exploring new avenues to address spatiotemporal biodiversity dynamics. Movement Ecology, 1(1), 1-13.

Katzner & Arlettaz 2020. Evaluating contributions of recent tracking-based animal movement ecology to conservation management. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 519.

Nathan et al. 2008. A movement ecology paradigm for unifying organismal movement research. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(49), 19052-19059.

Presentations 

Movement in the wildlife conservation management
- Pavla Hejcmanová (Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Czech Republic)

Moving tracks across socio-scapes
- Nyeema Harris (Yale University, USA)

Foraging personalities modify effects of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity
- Florian Jeltsch (University Potsdam, Germany)

Movement models identify management targets overlooked by common space-use models: a case study of invasive wildlife in an agroecosystem
- Garrett Street (Mississippi State University, USA)

Long term tracking of big mammals in detail: how could new biologging techniques improve data for wildlife management 
- Miloš Ježek (Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Czech Republic)

Supplemental feeding and animal movement: ecological consequences of a widespread management practice
- Federico Ossi (Fondazione Edmund Mach, Italy)

The Twiga Tracker Initiative: Merging Site Specific Conservation Management with Continental Scale Ecological Studies for Giraffe
- Michael Brown (Giraffe Conservation Foundation and Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, USA)

Modelling and managing animal and human movements in social-ecological systems
- Luca Börger (Swansea University, United Kingdom)