Environmental Predictability as a Cause and Consequence of Animal Movement.

The impacts of environmental predictability on the ecology and evolution of animal movement have been the subject of vigorous speculation for several decades. Recently, the swell of new biologging technologies has further stimulated their investigation. This advancing research frontier, however, still lacks conceptual unification and has so far focused little on converse effects. Populations of moving animals have ubiquitous effects on processes such as nutrient cycling and seed dispersal and may therefore shape patterns of environmental predictability. Here, we synthesise the main strands of the literature on the feedbacks between environmental predictability and animal movement and discuss how they may react to anthropogenic disruption, leading to unexpected threats for wildlife and the environment. Environmental predictability acts as a selective pressure on animal cognition and behaviour. Together, animals' cognition, movement abilities, and environmental predictability interactively determine the emergence of movement patterns. Conversely, animal movement can impact environmental predictability. This could create ecoevolutionary feedback loops, which are still very little studied. Human activities can impact environmental predictability and therefore animal movement and wildlife populations' viability. The study of the environmental predictability–animal movement interface has recently benefited from the improvement of tracking and remote sensing technologies but is lacking unification. Here we propose a unified view of this critical interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]