Abstract
Movement of individuals, mediated by localised interactions, plays a key role in numerous process including cellular biophysics and ecology. In this work, we propose an individual based model (IBM) of multispecies motility that accounts for various intraspecies and interspecies interactions in a community that is composed of an arbitrary number of distinct species. This framework allows us to explore how individual-level directional interactions scale up to generate spatial structure at the macroscale. To focus exclusively on the role of motility and directional bias in determining spatial structure, we consider conservative communities where the number of individuals in each species remains constant. We derive a mathematically tractable deterministic approximation of the IBM using an approach based on describing the dynamics of the spatial moments. An important objective of this study is to use the general IBM and spatial moment dynamics frameworks to investigate the impact of interactions in stereotypical community consisting of two distinct species. We explore how different features of interactions including interaction strength, spatial extent of interaction, and relative density of species influence the formation of the macroscale spatial patterns.