Movement is a fundamental process that impacts an animal’s fate, population dynamics and the structure of communities and ecosystems. In this thesis I consider open challenges and opportunities in how to model animal movement in the context of wild lion populations. I apply sophisticated modern statistical approaches from across the rapidly developing movement ecology field to long-term movement datasets from wild lions in Southern Africa to generate insights into connectivity between populations, local ranging behaviour and how lions respond to their thermal environment. Specifically, I evaluate how data inputs and approaches for modelling space use and connectivity perform in capturing lion movement (i) during dispersal across a landscape, (ii) at the home range scale and smaller, and (iii) how fine-scale animal movement can be linked to the environment and key climatic variables. As a whole, this body of work extends our understanding of the movement process in lions with particular application to spatial ecology for conservation research.