Ecological metrics and methods for GPS movement data

ABSTRACT

The growing field of movement ecology uses high resolution movement data to analyze animal behavior across multiple scales: from individual foraging decisions to population-level space-use patterns. These analyses contribute to various subfields of ecology – inter alia behavioral, disease, landscape, resource, and wildlife – and facilitate novel exploration in fields ranging from conservation planning to public health. Despite the growing availability and general accessibility of animal movement data, much potential remains for the analytical methods of movement ecology to be incorporated in all types of geographic analyses. This review provides for the Geographical Information Sciences (GIS) community an overview of the most common movement metrics and methods of analysis employed by animal ecologists. Through illustrative applications, we emphasize the potential for movement analyses to promote transdisciplinary GIS/wildlife-ecology research.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal movement
• GPS telemetry
• tracking data
• movement analysis
• movement ecology

Supplementary data

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed here.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the Getz and Brashares labs at UC Berkeley for their careful consideration of early manuscript drafts and helpful comments towards the shaping of this review. The impetus for this review arose from a presentation given by WMG at Ohio State University, at an NSF Workshop on Advancing Movement and Mobility Science by Bridging Research on Human Mobility and Animal Movement Ecology, organized by Harvey J. Miller, Jennifer A. Miller and Gil Bohrer.

Disclosure Statement

The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants NIH-GM 083863 and NSF-EEID 1617982 and by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding received from the National Science Foundation DBI-1052875.