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A Parsimonious Approach to Modeling Animal Movement Data

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  • Yann Tremblay
  • Patrick W Robinson
  • Daniel P Costa

Abstract

Animal tracking is a growing field in ecology and previous work has shown that simple speed filtering of tracking data is not sufficient and that improvement of tracking location estimates are possible. To date, this has required methods that are complicated and often time-consuming (state-space models), resulting in limited application of this technique and the potential for analysis errors due to poor understanding of the fundamental framework behind the approach. We describe and test an alternative and intuitive approach consisting of bootstrapping random walks biased by forward particles. The model uses recorded data accuracy estimates, and can assimilate other sources of data such as sea-surface temperature, bathymetry and/or physical boundaries. We tested our model using ARGOS and geolocation tracks of elephant seals that also carried GPS tags in addition to PTTs, enabling true validation. Among pinnipeds, elephant seals are extreme divers that spend little time at the surface, which considerably impact the quality of both ARGOS and light-based geolocation tracks. Despite such low overall quality tracks, our model provided location estimates within 4.0, 5.5 and 12.0 km of true location 50% of the time, and within 9, 10.5 and 20.0 km 90% of the time, for above, equal or below average elephant seal ARGOS track qualities, respectively. With geolocation data, 50% of errors were less than 104.8 km (

Suggested Citation

  • Yann Tremblay & Patrick W Robinson & Daniel P Costa, 2009. "A Parsimonious Approach to Modeling Animal Movement Data," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 4(3), pages 1-11, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0004711
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004711
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    Cited by:

    1. Walker, E. & Bez, N., 2010. "A pioneer validation of a state-space model of vessel trajectories (VMS) with observers’ data," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 221(17), pages 2008-2017.
    2. Tong Liu & Angela R Green & Luis F RodrĂ­guez & Brett C Ramirez & Daniel W Shike, 2015. "Effects of Number of Animals Monitored on Representations of Cattle Group Movement Characteristics and Spatial Occupancy," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(2), pages 1-17, February.

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