Documented movement of Canada Geese among wintering areas using mark-resight data. Found that movement corresponded to changes in winter harshness. This paper is a clear representation of how mark-recapture data can be used to monitor the movements of large mobile organisms. Since most trends in population dynamics have been measured in terms of birth and death rates, this paper also addresses the importance of movement in population dynamics. The cool thing is that one of the models they test for site fidelity in geese incorporates "memory" or "tradition" as a factor, which is important in longer lived species.

Still not 100% clear on what a "correlated random walk" is. The important thing about this paper is the methodology. Analyzing the movement of individual animals in terms of "move length" and "turning angle" and trying to determine if the process is a random one. The paper is a little confusing in describing exactly what is mean by a "correlated" random walk and how that differs from a truly random walk.

This is a serious modeling paper, so it might be tough to get through the math. But the main point is that in herbivores, gregarious behavior determines how density of individuals is affected by their resources. Basically, this paper addresses the effects of attraction or repulsion between individuals and how this affects the consumption of resources.

This paper gives a good explanation of random walks and how they can be applied to movement of animals. Also, Turchin defines what he calls a "residence index", which is measured movement within a resource patch. The author argues that the combination of this "residence index" and a diffusion model provides a reliable prediction of individual movement patterns, which can be translated to the spatial distribution of populations.

This is a great book that addresses measuring and modeling population redistribution using both plant and animal examples. Turchin goes over the reasons why studying movement is important and some of the data and methods currently used. The book then goes into several chapters on modeling, which are useful to someone who knows very little about modeling.

A good description of random walk models and how they are used in different scientific disciplines. The applications in chemistry and physics are interesting, but the application in biology, although the shortest section, is the most interesting. The paper doesn’t address use of random walk models in the movement of larger organisms, sticks to bacteria instead, but it is still a good overview of how these powerful models are used in science.

This was a fun paper to read because it describes theory, then uses a clear experimental example. It was difficult to assess whether these experiments would be applicable to real life situations but it does address an important aspect of these models (percolation models). In terms of metapopulations and movement between these, the degree of landscape connectivity depends on the spatial distribution of patches as well as the movement of individuals between and within those patches. This has important implications to conservation issues and movement between metapopulations of organisms.

This is another interesting experiment that continuously recorded the movement of individual organisms in patches of resources. The main objective of the paper was to address to what extent are the moves and turns made by organisms were made according to some overall movement strategy or in response to stimuli. The movement patterns of males and females were examined separately. The data are interesting in terms of movement within and between patches. Other than measuring movements, the authors are not clear on what hypotheses they are trying to test.