4.6 Article

A dynamic Brownian bridge movement model to estimate utilization distributions for heterogeneous animal movement

Journal

JOURNAL OF ANIMAL ECOLOGY
Volume 81, Issue 4, Pages 738-746

Publisher

WILEY-BLACKWELL
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2656.2012.01955.x

Keywords

behavioural change; encounter probability; GPS; home range; utilization distribution

Funding

  1. International Max Planck Research School for Organismal Biology
  2. NSF Movebank grant [0756920]
  3. Direct For Biological Sciences
  4. Div Of Biological Infrastructure [0756920] Funding Source: National Science Foundation

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1. The recently developed Brownian bridge movement model (BBMM) has advantages over traditional methods because it quantifies the utilization distribution of an animal based on its movement path rather than individual points and accounts for temporal autocorrelation and high data volumes. However, the BBMM assumes unrealistic homogeneous movement behaviour across all data. 2. Accurate quantification of the utilization distribution is important for identifying the way animals use the landscape. 3. We improve the BBMM by allowing for changes in behaviour, using likelihood statistics to determine change points along the animal's movement path. 4. This novel extension, outperforms the current BBMM as indicated by simulations and examples of a territorial mammal and a migratory bird. The unique ability of our model to work with tracks that are not sampled regularly is especially important for GPS tags that have frequent failed fixes or dynamic sampling schedules. Moreover, our model extension provides a useful one-dimensional measure of behavioural change along animal tracks. 5. This new method provides a more accurate utilization distribution that better describes the space use of realistic, behaviourally heterogeneous tracks.

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