Book excerpt: Migration is a widespread, critical, and increasingly-threatened behavior expressed by diverse animal taxa. Beyond being one of the most awe-inspiring biological phenomena on Earth, migration also plays a key role in ecosystem functioning worldwide. Despite the prevalence of this behavior and its ecological and evolutionary significance, migration is a complex behavior, leaving significant knowledge gaps in understanding how animals navigate environmental variability and human-induced rapid environmental change in deciding when and where to migrate. This gap stems in part from the difficulty of observing and integrating individual-level and population-level behavior of migratory species in the wild, especially in oceanic ecosystems. The complexity and scale of animal migration also challenges applied ecologists and natural resource managers to develop more dynamic management strategies for the protection of migratory species alongside human resource use. In this dissertation, I aim to advance both theoretical and applied ecological understanding of animal migration by exploring the role of social cues and environmental variability in migration, linking individual and population-level behavior for observation of migration in remote ecosystems (specifically in the migratory Eastern North Pacific blue whale population), and considering the tools and strategies required for dynamic and equitable management of migratory populations and the ecosystems they inhabit.