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 ant 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.