Animal Space Use

In this post I will again hammer wake-up calls into my own camp, researchers in the field of wildlife ecology, including the theory of habitat selection and and animal space use. For example, I have previously claimed that the Burt legacy has hampered progress in individual home range modelling, as has standard calculus done for population dynamics of open systems (including spatially extended versions). The two classical toolboxes for space use models; based on specific postulates from statistics and standard mathematics, are hampering progress towards improved model realism. As long as there still is a strong reluctance to replace these postulates by extending the theory head-on in the direction of biophysics of memory-influenced processes it is my personal conviction that the quagmire will prevail. However, there are now rapid and promising progress from research originating outside the traditional community of ecologists. These directions are pointing towards spatial models from

When I returned to the University of Oslo in 1990 to explore alternative pathways towards complex dispersion of populations it was natural to start out by orbiting around the Department of biology’s division that focused on population dynamical modelling. However, what became increasingly obvious was a tension that grew up between my choice of off-piste approaches, the introduction of rather unorthodox concepts and on the other side meeting a culture that stubbornly focused on the classical mathematical and statistical toolbox. I simply could not find satisfactory local support for working on scale-free dispersal processes under these terms, despite what I observed as thoroughly and broadly documented instances of such paradigm-breaking behaviour in the hundreds of papers surrounding confirmation of – for example – Taylor’s power law and fractal-patterned population dispersion. The theoretical culture was shying away from exploring a series of paradoxes that in my view were crying for