A movement ecology paradigm for unifying organismal movement research

Nathan and colleagues proposed a unifying framework that organizes the study of all organismal movement around four components: the internal state that motivates movement, the navigation capacity that orients it, the motion capacity that executes it, and the external environment. By linking these elements, the paradigm connects physiology, cognition, biomechanics, and ecology into a common language for asking why, how, and where animals move. The paper helped consolidate movement ecology as a coherent discipline rather than a scattering of taxon-specific methods. For felid researchers, it provides a scaffold for interpreting GPS trajectories not as bare geometry but as the outcome of internal drives, navigation, and landscape constraints. It is among the most cited conceptual works in the field.