The inappropriate use of time-to-independence biases estimates of activity patterns of free-ranging mammals derived from camera traps.

ABSTRACT: Measuring and comparing activity patterns provide key insights into the behavioral trade-offs that result in animal activity and their extrinsic and intrinsic drivers. Camera traps are a recently emerged source of data for sampling animal activity used to estimate activity patterns. However, nearly 70% of studies using such data to estimate activity patterns apply a time-to-independence data filter to discard appreciable periods of sampling effort. This treatment of activity as a discrete event emerged from the use of camera trap data to estimate animal abundances, but does not reflect the continuous nature of behavior, and may bias resulting estimates of activity patterns. We used a large, freely available camera trap dataset to test the effects of time to independence on the estimated ac

SUBMITTER: Peral C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9596328 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature