Smoothing splines of apex predator movement: Functional modeling strategies for exploring animal behavior and social interactions.

ABSTRACT: The collection of animal position data via GPS tracking devices has increased in quality and usage in recent years. Animal position and movement, although measured discretely, follows the same principles of kinematic motion, and as such, the process is inherently continuous and differentiable. I demonstrate the functionality and visual elegance of smoothing spline models. I discuss the challenges and benefits of implementing such an approach, and I provide an analysis of movement and social interaction of seven jaguars inhabiting the Taiamã Ecological Station, Pantanal, Brazil, a region with the highest known density of jaguars. In the analysis, I derive measures for pairwise distance, cooccurrence, and spatiotemporal association between jaguars, borrowing ideas from density estimation and

SUBMITTER: Whetten AB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8717279 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature