Conferences: Advancing Movement and Mobility Science by Bridging Research on Human Mobility and Animal Movement Ecology

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION GEOGRAPHY SPATIAL SCIENCES (GSS) PROGRAM ABSTRACT This award will support efforts to bring together scholars from around the world for two mobility and movement-related conferences at the University of Texas-Austin and Ohio State University. NSF support will facilitate the participation of up to 50 scholars and graduate students from the U.S. and other countries. The two conferences are aimed at stimulating research that draws from research communities that focus on human mobility and animal movement ecology. These two communities previously have not interacted extensively, so the conferences are expected to facilitate interactions across the research domains to enhance understanding of frameworks, approaches, and methods that are useful in studying varied complex, dynamic, spatiotemporal systems. The conferences will provide opportunities to share latest research and advance knowledge about understanding spatial behaviors and integrating research opportunities between the two domains. The conferences will stimulate research that ranges across a broad range of topics, including disease spread; social networks; information diffusion and its impacts on privacy and identity; knowledge transfer, and urban, social, and ecosystem dynamics. They also will facilitate scientific collaboration among young, underrepresented researchers who may not ordinarily have such networking opportunities. These conferences will bring together a unique blend of scholars from the human mobility community, such as transportation, urban science, sociology, and public health and those researchers associated with movement ecology, a nascent but growing research area in the ecological sciences. The conferences will take place at a time when scientific communities are just beginning to focus on movement and interactions motivated by advances in location-aware technologies and high spatial resolution global datasets. The first conference will focus on measuring and analyzing interactions among mobile entities. The second conference will focus on analyzing mobility data in the geographic context. The events will include a balanced mix of keynote addresses from top scholars in the fields, interdisciplinary research presentations to facilitate interactions amongst the diverse set of scientists, and breakout group activities to delve deeper into specific topical areas.