new article: habitat use and animal movement

new article: habitat use and animal movement

October 24, 2016

vantoor_2016_ecs21498-fig-0001The article “Temporal segmentation of animal trajectories informed by habitat use” in Ecosphere is finally out. Most animals live in seasonal environments and experience very different conditions throughout the year. Behavioral strategies like migration, hibernation, and a life cycle adapted to the local seasonality help to cope with fluctuations in environmental conditions. Thus, how an individual utilizes the environment depends both on the current availability of habitat and the behavioral prerequisites of the individual at that time. While the increasing availability and richness of animal movement data has facilitated the development of algorithms that classify behavior by movement geometry, changes in the environmental correlates of animal movement have so far not been exploited for a behavioral annotation. Here, we suggest a method that uses these changes in individual–environment associations to divide animal location data into segments of higher ecological coherence, which we term niche segmentation. We use time series of random forest models to evaluate the transferability of habitat use over time to cluster observational data accordingly. We show that our method is able to identify relevant changes in habitat use corresponding to both changes in the availability of habitat and how it was used using simulated data, and apply our method to a tracking data set of common teal (Anas crecca). The niche segmentation proved to be robust, and segmented habitat suitability outperformed models neglecting the temporal dynamics of habitat use. Overall, we show that it is possible to classify animal trajectories based on changes of habitat use similar to geometric segmentation algorithms. We conclude that such an environmentally informed classification of animal trajectories can provide new insights into an individuals’ behavior and enables us to make sensible predictions of how suitable areas might be connected by movement in space and time.

van Toor, M. L., S. H. Newman, J. Y. Takekawa, M. Wegmann, and K. Safi. 2016. Temporal segmentation of animal trajectories informed by habitat use. Ecosphere 7(10):e01498. 10.1002/ecs2.1498

you may also like:

New PhD student Lukas Block

New PhD student Lukas Block

We are pleased to welcome Lukas Block as a new PhD student.  Lukas holds a Master's degree in Geological Sciences from the Free University of Berlin, where he investigated the stratigraphic record of the Anthropocene in lacustrine sediments. He has gained...

Press Release by University of Würzburg about our Arctic research

Press Release by University of Würzburg about our Arctic research

Our work in the Arctic on Svalbard was covered by the press team of the University of Würzburg. It covers our focus on studying the region’s ecosystems and the effects of climate change on its environment using Earth Observation methods. Please see the german version...

Prof Gustau Camps-Valls visits DLR-EOC

Prof Gustau Camps-Valls visits DLR-EOC

Today we had the great pleasure to welcome Prof Gustau Camps-Valls at DLR's Earth Observation Center (EOC).   Prof Gustau Camps-Valls is a Full Professor in Electrical Engineering and leads the Image and Signal Processing (ISP) group at Universitat de València (...

Advancing Forest Inventory: Field Trip to Sailershausen

Advancing Forest Inventory: Field Trip to Sailershausen

Today, staff from the Earth Observation Research Cluster conducted a field trip to Sailershausen to visit three fully inventoried forest plots and to discuss examples of remote sensing applications with the forestry administration of the University of Würzburg. The...

PhD defense by Alexandra Bell

PhD defense by Alexandra Bell

We cordially invite all EORC staff members, interested colleagues as well as students and the interested public to join the public defense by Alexandra Bell on her PhD "Spaceborne Remote Sensing for Policy - Supporting National Compliance with International Policy...