Abstract of the talk// Most animals have movement behaviors that are strikingly different from the assumptions underlying traditional ecological models. Despite mounting empirical evidence, foundational ecological models still fail to account for realistic movement and populations’ spatial structure when modeling demographic interactions. In a forthcoming paper in Ecology Letters, Rafael and colleagues present a framework that reconciles realistic animal behavior with tractable analytical models. They developed the Range-Resident Logistic Model by combining mathematically tractable individual-based models (IBMs) and spatial analyses to demonstrate how range residency determines population carrying capacity. To understand their results analytically, they formalize the crowding index for moving organisms, which summarizes all the relevant spatial information for the demography. This crowding index can be directly estimated from tracking data, making it one of the best candidate tools to extract population dynamics information from animal movement data. The scientists are also extending the proposed framework to explore how realistic movement and adaptive behavior play an important role in the growth of independent populations and other complex ecological phenomena such as disease transmission and ecological invasions.