Explosive growth in the availability of animal movement tracking data is providing
unprecedented opportunities for investigating the linkages between behavior and
ecology over large spatial scales. Cognitive movement ecology brings together
aspects of animal cognition (perception, learning, and memory) to understand how
animals’ context and experience influence movement and space use, affording
insights into encounters, territoriality, migration, and biogeography, among many
other topics.

Vascular plant reproductive structures are extremely diverse in form and are often quite complex; for example, many flowers are composed of highly specialized organs in intricate arrangements. Such diversity has not always been present - the earliest known reproductive structures are very simple - but quantifying how complexity has changed through time is challenging because it is difficult to even define exactly what complexity is.

Complex biological systems can be described by any one of a number of features, including the tools used to deconstruct interactions between the parcels, actors, and forces that compose these systems. In addition, they are defined by a growing understanding of how context shapes these interactions, and by extension, the behavior of biological systems. In this seminar, I will highlight these aspects of complex biological systems using several different model problems: protein evolution, genomic prediction, and the interaction between pandemics and the criminal legal system.