Describing the energy landscape for flying animals: a tale of environmental proxies, scale and resolution

Movement allows organisms to access resources and avoid unfavourable environmental conditions, predators, and competition, while facilitating the redistribution of nutrients, energy, and species across ecosystems that are kilometres to continents apart. However, movement comes at a cost, and increasing attention is being paid to both the factors that determine this cost and its implications for these ecological processes. Over the past eight years at the MPI-AB, I have focused on quantifying how physical characteristics of the landscape and atmosphere shape the cost of movement - what we refer to as the energy landscape – specifically in flying animals. Despite the use of atmospheric energy to reduce flight cost is well known for specific guilds of birds, the extent to which this strategy can be employed across taxa had only been hypothesised. I began my PhD by investigating how the energy landscape influences the flight behaviour of a single bird species, and then extended this question across scales and flying taxa. These studies shared two common denominators: a conceptual one - that actually most flying species can, to some extent, exploit atmospheric energy to reduce their flight costs; and a methodological one – the frequent mismatch in resolution between the behavioural data we collect and the environmental data we use to explain and predict them. Starting a new postdoc in January has given me the opportunity to reflect on where I began, what I have learned so far, and how I would like this to shape the direction of my future research. From understanding the environmental factors determining flight cost, what can we infer about their cascading effects on ecosystem dynamics? In this talk, I would like to share some of these reflections with you.