Insect movement is often summarized by a single label such as dispersal, migration, or connectivity, although the underlying sequence includes departure, transfer, settlement, redistribution, and later demographic consequences. Collapsing these levels can make evidence from physiology, tracking, radar, genetics, landscape models, and population monitoring appear more interchangeable than it is. This ecological synthesis uses cross-scale conceptual mapping to organize evidence by movement stage, evidence class, biological scale, and inferential distance. It does not estimate pooled effects or introduce a new empirical dataset. The evidence supports stage-specific and context-dependent movement. Internal state and developmental history can shape departure-related phenotypes; landscape cues, sensory orientation, and wind can structure paths; realized settlement requires evidence beyond habitat suitability; and repeated individual movements can produce local or regional redistribution. The article proposes that scale-up should be represented as conditional transitions rather than as an automatic chain from movement capacity to population connectivity. Conservation and population inference should distinguish what was directly observed from what was inferred across stages or scales. The proposed architecture is intended as a boundary-preserving synthesis for designing measurements and tests, not as an empirically validated universal model.
