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Integrated movement science - new research field

05-03-2021

An international group of scientists, including researchers from the SpaceOs Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences, lead by Dr. Urška Demšar from the University of St Andrews, published an article in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science entitled "Establishing the integrated science of movement: bringing together concepts and methods from animal and human movement analysis" . The aim of the paper is to unify the two fields of science - human and animal mobility analysis, identifying similarities and differences between them. Mobility research is a rapidly expanding field gaining in popularity. This year, the European Research Council (ERC) has distinguished the science of human mobility in environment and space as a separate field. The new paper sets a further direction for its development, which is to synchronise the development of both fields, human and animal mobility, which has so far taken place in parallel and independently of each other.

The paper contains a structured collection of literature gathered by experts from both fields. An extensive collection of literature from both fields have been reviewed, comparing used datasets, applied analysis methods and their applications, which has been done at the individual and collective levels. As a result of the work, twelve typical analytical tasks were identified, which, as it turned out, are undertaken in both fields. Moreover, similar methods, sometimes modified and defined in a different way, are often used to solve similar problems. On the other hand, some approaches used in one field are not applied in the other, although it seems that they could bring a fresh perspective to solve research problems. An important result of the work is the development of an universal analytical model of mobility, which lays the theoretical foundations for the construction of a new combined field of science, unifying the nomenclature and expanding the number of potential applications of the methods already developed. Therefore, this work is an excellent starting point in building an integrated science of mobility.

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