A cross-disciplinary way forward in the study of movement

Motion is intertwined with all living and non-living entities. It impacts on a myriad of processes across spatial, temporal and organisational scales. Within life sciences, the mechanisms underlying the vast array of observed movement behaviours have created a community of modellers conversing through a common language. This language, born from the fusion of concepts, tools and techniques to study the motion of biological organisms in all its shapes and forms, is collectively called the mathematics of movement. The language vocabulary has steadily expanded in recent times, thanks in part to modern tracking technologies that allow the recording of movement paths with an ever increasing resolution of an ever expanding number of species. While these empirical advances and the parallel progress in the analysis of tracking data and their underlying models have been instrumental to understand the challenges that our ecosystem and our health face, their increased sophistication have created semantic barriers between movement modellers across disciplines. In the spirit of Newton’s tradition, as we draw near the third century anniversary of his passing, we lessen these barriers by highlighting within a past, present and future perspective the value and opportunities in employing a shared approach with common metrics for the study of movement.