Accounting for phenology in the analysis of animal movement

DOI10.1111/BIOM.13052zbMATH Open1436.62630arXiv1806.09473OpenAlexW2963021656WikidataQ92289670 ScholiaQ92289670MaRDI QIDQ5214552FDOQ5214552

Authors: Henry R. Scharf, Mevin B. Hooten, Ryan Wilson, George M. Durner, Todd C. Atwood 

Publication date: 7 February 2020

Published in: Biometrics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The analysis of animal tracking data provides an important source of scientific understanding and discovery in ecology. Observations of animal trajectories using telemetry devices provide researchers with information about the way animals interact with their environment and each other. For many species, specific geographical features in the landscape can have a strong effect on behavior. Such features may correspond to a single point (e.g., dens or kill sites), or to higher-dimensional subspaces (e.g., rivers or lakes). Features may be relatively static in time (e.g., coastlines or home-range centers), or may be dynamic (e.g., sea ice extent or areas of high-quality forage for herbivores). We introduce a novel model for animal movement that incorporates active selection for dynamic features in a landscape. Our approach is motivated by the study of polar bear (Ursus maritimus) movement. During the sea ice melt season, polar bears spend much of their time on sea ice above shallow, biologically productive water where they hunt seals. The changing distribution and characteristics of sea ice throughout the late spring through early fall means that the location of valuable habitat is constantly shifting. We develop a model for the movement of polar bears that accounts for the effect of this important landscape feature. We introduce a two-stage procedure for approximate Bayesian inference that allows us to analyze over 300,000 observed locations of 186 polar bears from 2012--2016. We use our proposed model to answer a particular question posed by wildlife managers who seek to cluster polar bears from the Beaufort and Chukchi seas into sub-populations.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.09473

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zbMATH Keywords

animal movementsea iceresource selection functionUrsus maritimus

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Directional data; spatial statistics (62H11) Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis (62P10) Applications of statistics to environmental and related topics (62P12) Animal behavior (92D50)

Cited In (3)

• Bayesian estimation of heterogeneous environments from animal movement data
• Imputation approaches for animal movement modeling
• Agent-based models for collective animal movement: proximity-induced state switching

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