The American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) is a keystone species that exhibits strong top-down effects on both ecosystem structure and function. As a highly mobile predator, alligators can link spatially segregated food webs and influence prey abundance, composition, and behavior across space and time. Therefore, understanding alligator movement patterns has relevant applications to alligator ecology and management, as well as the study of communities or ecosystems across the alligator's range. We provide a brief review that highlights several of the challenges of studying alligator movement patterns. We then describe recent advancements in animal tracking technology that are relevant to the study of crocodilians, including reductions in transmitter size, improved battery longevity and location fix precision, and the ability to pair movement data with animalborne sensor information (e.g., temperature, velocity). Given the rapidly expanding transmitter options now available, we discuss some of the benefits and drawbacks of the major transmitter platforms (radio, satellite, and acoustic) and analytical frameworks, as guidance for future studies. Next, we review the existing literature and discuss potential drivers of variation in movement patterns including demographic, environmental, and behavioral factors, and how they may interact. We then synthesize our knowledge of alligator movement behaviors and discuss their potential community- and ecosystem-level implications. We conclude our chapter by delineating specific research needs that could add both breadth and depth to our understanding of alligator movements, including future studies that focus on adult females and inland or northern-latitude populations, as well as the need for longer-term datasets to evaluate site-fidelity patterns or the lack thereof.
