Caution is warranted when using animal space-use and movement to infer behavioral states.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Identifying the behavioral state for wild animals that can't be directly observed is of growing interest to the ecological community. Advances in telemetry technology and statistical methodologies allow researchers to use space-use and movement metrics to infer the underlying, latent, behavioral state of an animal without direct observations. For example, researchers studying ungulate ecology have started using these methods to quantify behaviors related to mating strategies. However, little work has been done to determine if assumed behaviors inferred from movement and space-use patterns correspond to actual behaviors of individuals.

Methods

Using a dataset with male and female white-tailed deer location data, we evaluated the ability of these two methods to corr

SUBMITTER: Buderman FE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8196457 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature