One of the central questions in ecology deals with understanding the processes underlying patterns in population abundance and the distribution of species at small and large spatial scales. The distribution of individuals of a species across a landscape may be influenced by local processes acting on births and deaths and propensity to dispersal; and by landscape-level processes influencing the colonisation and extinction of local populations and the movement of individuals between populations. Relatively few studies examine both sets of processes. Furthermore, the response of species to these ecological conditions may depend on species-specific traits, such as body size, behavior and other functional traits, but the roles of such functional traits is not fully understood. I propose to investigate the ecological processes at local and landscape levels influencing population densities by taking a behavioral ecological approach and using butterflies as a model system. Studying the behavior of individuals allows us to link population patterns with underlying ecological and evolutionary processes. While population ecological studies allow us to estimate the relationship between ecological variables (such as resource dispersion) and population densities, taking a behavioral ecological approach can help understand, from first principles, how resource dispersion influences populations by influencing different behavioral traits, e.g., individual movement, foraging rates, oviposition rates. These individual-level traits influence demographic parameters (e.g., fecundity, mortality, immigration, emigration rates) and thereby can influence population densities. I propose to focus on the influence of two key ecological factors, namely resource distribution and landscape composition. I propose to examine the influence of resource dispersion at local patch-level and landscape-level scales on butterfly behavior. I plan to examine how these relationships vary with functional traits of species and use this understanding to predict and test relationships between landscape composition and population density patterns of butterflies.