Increasing interest in the complexity, variation and drivers of movement-related behaviours promise new insight into fundamental components of ecology. Resolving the multidimensionality of spatially explicit behaviour remains a challenge for investigating tactics and their relation to niche construction, but high-resolution movement data are providing unprecedented understanding of the diversity of spatially explicit behaviours. We introduce a framework for investigating individual variation in movement-defined resource selection that integrates the behavioural and ecological niche concepts. We apply it to long-term tracking data of 115 African elephants (Loxodonta africana), illustrating how a behavioural hypervolume can be defined based on differences between individuals and their ecological settings, and applied to explore population heterogeneity. While normative movement behaviour is frequently used to characterise population behaviour, we demonstrate the value of leveraging heterogeneity in the behaviour to gain greater insight into population structure and the mechanisms driving space-use tactics.
Keywords: African elephant (Loxodonta africana); GPS telemetry; biologging; home range; hypervolume; individual variation; migration; movement ecology; multivariate analyses; resource selection function (RSF).
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