Differentiating spillover: an examination of cross-habitat movement

The movement of organisms between habitats is a fundamental process that occurs within all ecological disciplines. Once the organism has entered a recipient habitat, its behavior generates a movement pattern as it may remain, move on, return, or constantly move between, producing different population dynamics and environmental changes. Originally, “spillover” was one of these distinct patterns - the uni-directional movement from a donor habitat to a different, adjacent recipient habitat. However, ecological definitions of spillover have become overly generalized to include any cross-habitat movement. As spillover research has nearly doubled since 2018, it is imperative to have universal nomenclature and methods that can quantify the term. This will allow us to advance our understanding of organism behavior in dynamic landscapes. To assess how spillover has been addressed within empirical literature, we reviewed 337 studies and organized them into the ecological disciplines of agricultur..., We compiled a database of spillover studies that were found in the Web of Science (http:www.webofknowledge.com) records up to March 31, 2021. We used the search terms “spillover” and “spill over”. We then excluded categories outside of the biology discipline (e.g., economic or chemical spillover) as well as human epidemiology literature, which uses language very distinct from ecological work. As the remaining publications included several hundred papers disparate from organismal spillover, we further refined our search using the terms “organism”, “biodiversity”, or “population”. Articles included in our database 1) specifically mentioned “spillover” or “spill over” within the text, 2) used living organisms as the propagule of movement, and 3) empirically assessed spillover or the consequences of spillover. In this way, we collected a broad spectrum of papers that included ecological, behavioral, evolutionary, applied, and basic science articles., The use of a text-reading program is necessary to read the file. The file provided is formatted .csv