Analysing small-scale aggregation in animal visits in space and time: the ST-BBD method

Authored by Tyler R. Bonnell, Colin A. Chapman, Pierre Dutilleul, Rafael Reyna-Hurtado, Raul Uriel Hernandez-Sarabia, Raja Sengupta

Date Published: 2013-02

DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.12.014

Sponsors: National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) National Geographic Society Canada Research Chairs Program United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) United States National Science Foundation (NSF)

Platforms: GeoTools

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

Movement behaviour plays an important role in many ecological interactions. As animals move through the environment, they generate movement patterns, which are a combined result of landscape characteristics and species-specific behaviour. Measuring these ranging patterns is being facilitated by technological advances in collection methods, such as GPS collars, that are capturing movement on finer spatial and temporal scales. We propose the use of a novel spatiotemporal analytical framework (ST-BBD), based on the beta-binomial distribution (BBD) model, to measure small-scale aggregation in animal movement data sets, including two simulated and three collected primate data sets. We use this approach to distinguish different habitat uses of three primate species (red colobus, Procolobus rufomitratus, black howler, Alouatta pigra, and spider monkey, Ateles geoffroyi) and quantify their specific use of the landscape in space and in time, using a parameter of the BBD that measures the variation in sites visited on a landscape. We found that estimates of aggregation in habitat use were higher in the frugivorous spider monkey, compared to the more folivorous howler monkey, and that in the red colobus, aggregation in site visits was dependent on group size and food availability. Applications of this framework to animal movement data could be useful in understanding ecological systems where habitat use is an important factor, such as the relationships between hosts and parasites, or parent plants and seed dispersers. (C) 2012 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Tags

Agent-based model Animal movement Habitat use beta-binomial distribution folivore frugivore monkey small-scale aggregation spatiotemporal point pattern analysis