New method for analyzing tracking data enables better understanding of behavioral patterns of animals
Using this new tracking technology, it has become possible to record movements of animals and automatically assign behavioral activities such as foraging, resting or flying to the tracking data.
The authors of this article introduce a new method that is based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), which decomposes the movement signal, recorded by a tracking device fitted to the animal, into low and high frequencies. The low-frequency components relate to more gradual movement changes that require more time to develop, while the high-frequency components are representing more abrupt, short-term movements. Thus, it becomes possible to analyze movement behavior at different temporal scales.
The authors validated their method using different data sets, including among others data of migrating turkey vultures (Cathartes aura), for which different migration stages were to be automatically detected. The comparison with several other methods showed that the new DWT segmentation was more versatile and more accurate than the other methods presently available for this purpose. It can be used for more movement parameters and yields a better agreement with simulated as well as with real data. It correctly identifies the birds’ migration modes as they were identified by human experts. The new method offers a valuable contribution for animal ecology research as well as practical conservation biology, supporting the study of behavioral patterns of animals in natural and human dominated landscapes.
More news
- Directed Species Loss from Species-Rich Forests Strongly Decreases Productivity
- Daily Mobility for Healthy Aging
- Water Towers of the world ranked on vulnerability
- Himalayan lakes are exacerbating glacial melt
- Gaming for better data
- Poor communication torpedoes a second national park
- Black mystery in the Amazon River
- Find your way back with intelligent navigation systems
- The emotional entanglements of smartphones in the field
- From fires to oceans
- Ice on a stick in soil research
- Melting glaciers causing sea levels to rise at ever greater rates
- Do financial incentives motivate farmers to conserve land?
- How landscapes contribute to our well-being
- Ice-sheet growing from the base
- Charcoal: Major Missing Piece in the Global Carbon Cycle
- Extracting mobility patterns from Call Detail Records
- Mapping functional diversity of forests with remote sensing
- Unaccompanied minor asylum seekers - feelings of belonging in educational experiences
- The effect of anxiety and spatial abilities in route learning from maps
- Making Concessions at the Mining Frontier in Burkina Faso
- Who is responsible for negative effects of anthropogenic climate change?
- Glaciers in the Karakoram Mountains are in balance since the 1970s
- The mega-event syndrome
- Historically unprecedented global glacier decline in the early 21st century
- Variability and evolution of global land surface phenology
- A literature-based estimation of fire-derived organic matter in soils
- Neoliberal austerity and the marketisation of elderly care
- Institutional shopping for natural resource management in a protected area and indigenous territory in the Bolivian Amazon