Collective responses to forecasted landscape-scale resource variation

How might animal collectives change their behaviours to take into account variable resource landscapes changing with the climate? What will that mean for their sociality, ecological function, and conflict with humans? The CASCB project Collective responses to forecasted landscape-scale resource variation aims to answer these questions.

“We aim to produce forecasts of species-specific resource estimates at the scale, level of aggregation, and ecological context of the data through the integration of new and existing plant community data, satellite remote sensing, and climate projections,” says Chase Núñez. From his perspective, the project’s innovations have occurred naturally from an interdisciplinary approach, situating collective behaviour as a response to forecasted changes in the abundance and distribution of plant species, enabling testable predictions of how animal collectives can shape, or be shaped by, environmental change.

“This project provides a theoretical and methodological direction for collective behaviour studies to expand on the spatio-temporal scale by uniting aspects of complex systems science, community ecology, and statistical inference,” he says. “The data produced by this project will not only increase the scientific value of past and future movement data, but also provide a new workflow and source of data for other projects, fuelling future collaborations that we hope will extend beyond the proposed work.”