Quantifying animal movement for caching foragers: the path identification index (PII) and cougars, Puma concolor.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Many studies of animal movement have focused on directed versus area-restricted movement, which rely on correlations between step-length and turn-angles and on stationarity through time to define behavioral states. Although these approaches might apply well to grazing in patchy landscapes, species that either feed for short periods on large, concentrated food sources or cache food exhibit movements that are difficult to model using the traditional metrics of turn-angle and step-length alone.

Results

We used GPS telemetry collected from a prey-caching predator, the cougar (Puma concolor, Linnaeus), to test whether combining metrics of site recursion, spatiotemporal clustering, speed, and turning into an index of movement using partial sums, improves the abil

SUBMITTER: Ironside KE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5700564 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature