Animal Space Use

In my book I summarize the statistical mechanics behind the dominating framework for animal space use models; mechanistic behaviour. This framework comes in two main “flavours”; with and without spatial memory. However, following this introduction the book is devoted to a third approach, based on non-mechanistic behaviour; called parallel processing. In a new series of blog posts, I start by showing how to discriminate between these three scenaria at the conceptual level  In fact, as shown in the Scaling cube (search Archive) I demarcate eight statistical-mechanical flavours of space use; called universality classes of space use, but let’s keep it simpler here. First, consider a habitat playground like the one in the image to the right. White and brown area represents the matrix environment. White habitat is not selected for (basically, providing transit zones) while brown areas are landscape parts that are actively avoided. Green patches represent habitat elements – “resource pat