Movement Ecology
Tracking Behavior to Understand Recovery
Movement shapes every ecological process — migration, foraging, reproduction, and survival. The QCE Lab studies how fish navigate complex river networks and respond to environmental change using acoustic telemetry, high-resolution tracking, and hierarchical modeling frameworks. These tools allow us to quantify movement at individual, population, and community levels, linking behavior to flow, temperature, and habitat dynamics.
Our goal is to understand not only where fish go, but why — how cues such as discharge, seasonality, or habitat complexity trigger shifts in behavior that influence population recovery and ecosystem function.
Abacus plots are a common tool to explore initial movement patterns and began building models that can explain what fish are up to, or as I sometimes wonder to myself “what them fish doing?”
From Individuals to Populations
We integrate telemetry detections, capture–recapture data, and environmental time series to estimate survival, space use, and behavioral states. Using models such as Cormack-Jolly-Seber, POPAN, and openCR, we identify how environmental variables drive transitions between resident and migratory behaviors, and estimate abundance and survival. This multi-scale approach reveals how flow events, temperature thresholds, and habitat connectivity shape movement strategies across species and systems.
These analyses provide managers with predictive insight into when and where fish are most vulnerable or active — information that improves timing of restoration actions, flow management, and removal programs.
We can track fish in aquaria to begin unraveling behavioral patterns in response to stimuli.
Or at the pond level using high residency acoustic technology to scale up manipulative experiments. Interact with the plot above to see fine scale movement patterns of a fish in an experimental pond.