A central question in ecology is how to link processes that occur over
different scales. The daily interactions of individual organisms ultimately
determine community dynamics, population fluctuations and the functioning
of entire ecosystems. Observations of these multiscale ecological
processes are constrained by various technological, biological or logistical
issues, and there are often vast discrepancies between the scale at which
observation is possible and the scale of the question of interest. Animal
movement is characterized by processes that act over multiple spatial and
temporal scales. Second-by-second decisions accumulate to produce
annual movement patterns. Individuals influence, and are influenced by,
collective movement decisions, which then govern the spatial distribution
of populations and the connectivity of meta-populations. While the
field of movement ecology is experiencing unprecedented growth in the
availability of movement data, there remain challenges in integrating
observations with questions of ecological interest. In this article, we present
the major challenges of addressing these issues within the context of the
Serengeti wildebeest migration, a keystone ecological phenomena that
crosses multiple scales of space, time and biological complexity.
This article is part of the theme issue ’Collective movement ecology’