Ulrike E Schlägel, Volker Grimm, Niels Blaum, Pierluigi Colangeli, Melanie Dammhahn, Jana Eccard, Sebastian Hausmann, Antje Herde, Heribert Hofer, Jasmin Joshi

Organismal movement is ubiquitous and facilitates important ecological mechanisms that drive community and metacommunity composition and hence biodiversity. In most existing ecological theories and models in biodiversity research, movement is represented simplistically, ignoring the behavioural basis of movement and consequently the variation in behaviour at species and individual level. However, in an age where human endeavours modify climate and land use, the behavioural processes of organisms in response to this, including movement, become critical to understanding resulting biodiversity loss. Here, we draw together research from different subdisciplines in ecology to understand the impact of individual-level movement processes on community-level patterns in species composition and coexistence. We join the movement ecology framework with the key concepts from metacommunity theory, community assembly and modern coexistence theory using the idea of emergence: various behavioural aspects of movement scale up to local and regional patterns in species mobility and mobile-link generated patterns in abiotic and biotic environmental conditions, which in turn influence, at ecological time scales, mechanisms such as dispersal limitation, environmental filtering, and niche partitioning. We conclude by highlighting challenges and promising future avenues to data generation, data analysis and complementary modelling approaches and provide a brief outlook on how a new behavioural-based view on movement becomes important in understanding the response of communities to the ever-changing environment of the Anthropocene.