Title of Document: ANIMAL DISTRIBUTIONS AND MOVEMENT BEHAVIORS IN RELATION TO RESOURCE DYNAMICS

Animal movements, whether spatially constrained or spread across broad spatial scales, are often motivated by a need for resources. This thesis seeks to explore the role spatial and temporal resource dynamics may play in animal movements and population distributions. The first chapter synthesizes existing research of animal movements and builds a conceptual framework that integrates individual-level movement behaviors. It distinguishes among (1) non-oriented movements in response to proximate stimuli, (2) oriented movements utilizing perceptual cues of distant targets, and (3) memory mechanisms that assume prior knowledge of a target’s location. I outline how species ’ use of these mechanisms should depend on resource dynamics and lead to population-level patterns, such as sedentary ranges, migration between disjunct and predictable seasonal resource areas, or nomadism when resource distributions are unpredictable in both space and time. The second chapter examines resource dynamics in an empirical setting, which, especially in ecosystems where changes may happen rapidly across broa