From metabolism to coexistence: Understanding animal movement and community dynamics through energy

Recent advances in the field of movement ecology have revealed intricate links between the movement of individual animals and the biodiversity of ecosystems. Hence, to advance our understanding of biodiversity and its ongoing loss due to global change, we may benefit from considering animal movement processes. Movement both shapes and is shaped by an animal’s energy state. Additionally, fitness, and ultimately population dynamics, depend on energy allocation to survival, growth, and reproduction. Consequently, integrating energetics into frameworks that link movement and biodiversity is a logical next step to uncover how individual-level processes shape species dynamics within communities. Here, we propose a conceptual framework linking animal energetics, movement behavior, and community dynamics to explore how energy fluxes drive movement, mediate species interactions, and shape coexistence. The energy available to an animal motivates and constrains movement, while behaviors that maximize net energy gain, by minimizing costs and maximizing intake, affect fitness, species interactions, and community structure. This perspective reveals how energy dynamics can drive decisions on whether, how, where, and when animals move, and how energy-based equalizing mechanisms (e.g., similar energy balances among species) and energy-based stabilizing mechanisms (e.g., energy costs that limit large populations) underpin coexistence and biodiversity patterns. By synthesizing insights from community ecology, movement ecology, and ecophysiology, we advocate for a novel mechanistic approach to understanding diversity dynamics and predicting the impacts of environmental change on biodiversity. We call for the development of interdisciplinary methods to address key open questions in this area and provide examples of how this framework can be applied to advance understanding across varied ecological systems.