Dresden 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 5: Focus Session: Physics of Behavior (joint session SOE/DY)

DY 5.4: Vortrag

Montag, 9. März 2026, 10:45–11:00, GÖR/0226

Understanding how movement behaviors shape animal encounters and their ecological consequences — •Anudeep Surendran — Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Görlitz, Germany

Encounters between individuals underlie key ecological processes such as predation, mating, and disease transmission, making encounter rates a direct link between individual movement behavior and population-level outcomes. We investigate how two common features of animal movement-directional persistence and range residency-jointly shape encounter rates. Using the Ornstein Uhlenbeck with foraging (OUF) model, which integrates these two properties of animal movement, we derive exact analytical expressions for encounter rates and show that, for range-resident animals, the effect of persistence depends strongly on the degree of home-range overlap. Based on this theoretical result, we then introduce a new encounter-based metric that quantifies the spatial organization of home ranges at scales relevant to animal encounters. We finally apply this metric to movement data from lowland tapirs (Tapirus terrestris) in Brazils Pantanal region, and find a significant level of home-range spatial segregation that is consistent with the solitary behavior of this species.

Keywords: Animal movement; Range residency; movement model; Animal encounters