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movedesign: Shiny R app to evaluate sampling design for animal movement studies

Authors :
Silva, I.
Fleming, C.H.
Noonan, M.J.
Fagan, W.F.
Calabrese, Justin
Silva, I.
Fleming, C.H.
Noonan, M.J.
Fagan, W.F.
Calabrese, Justin
Source :
ISSN: 2041-210X
Publication Year :
2023

Abstract

Projects focused on movement behaviour and home range are commonplace, but beyond a focus on choosing appropriate research questions, there are no clear guidelines for such studies. Without these guidelines, designing an animal tracking study to produce reliable estimates of space-use and movement properties (necessary to answer basic movement ecology questions), is often done in an ad hoc manner.We developed ‘movedesign’, a user-friendly Shiny application, which can be utilized to investigate the precision of three estimates regularly reported in movement and spatial ecology studies: home range area, speed and distance travelled. Conceptually similar to statistical power analysis, this application enables users to assess the degree of estimate precision that may be achieved with a given sampling design; that is, the choices regarding data resolution (sampling interval) and battery life (sampling duration).Leveraging the ‘ctmm’ R package, we utilize two methods proven to handle many common biases in animal movement datasets: autocorrelated kernel density estimators (AKDEs) and continuous-time speed and distance (CTSD) estimators. Longer sampling durations are required to reliably estimate home range areas via the detection of a sufficient number of home range crossings. In contrast, speed and distance estimation requires a sampling interval short enough to ensure that a statistically significant signature of the animal's velocity remains in the data.This application addresses key challenges faced by researchers when designing tracking studies, including the trade-off between long battery life and high resolution of GPS locations collected by the devices, which may result in a compromise between reliably estimating home range or speed and distance. ‘movedesign’ has broad applications for researchers and decision-makers, supporting them to focus efforts and resources in achieving the optimal sampling design strategy for their research questions, prioritizing the corre

Details

Database :
OAIster
Journal :
ISSN: 2041-210X
Notes :
ISSN: 2041-210X, Methods in Ecology and Evolution 14 (9);; 2216 - 2225, English
Publication Type :
Electronic Resource
Accession number :
edsoai.on1406015861
Document Type :
Electronic Resource