Studying animal movements with networks

03 June 2020 par webmaster
Ethologists from the CRCA-CBI have partnered with EDB ecologists, ENVT researchers, and the company Xerius to develop a new methodology to simplify and characterize animal movements in space and time.

What happens in an animal’s head when it moves? How does it look for food, sexual partners or a migration site? Does it plan its route or does it move randomly? Ethologists from the Centre de Recherche sur la Cognition Animale de Toulouse (CRCA-CBI / CNRS / Université Toulouse III Paul Sabatier) have joined forces with ecologists from the Laboratoire Évolution et Diversité Biologique de Toulouse (EDB – CNRS / Université Toulouse III Paul Sabatier / IRD), Researchers from the École Nationale Vétérinaire de Toulouse (ENVT), together with a company specialising in radio-tracking tools (Xerius), have developed a new methodology within everyone’s reach, based on network analysis, in order to simplify and characterise animal movements in space and time. This new study was published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

The multiplication of automated tracking tools now makes it possible to easily obtain high-resolution movement data for a large number of animal species. At the most basic level, it is possible to visualize the sequence of animal positions by joining them by a line, i.e. plotting the animal’s trajectory. Speed, the distance travelled between two successive positions, the time spent in a specific position and changes in direction are some of the main parameters that can be extracted from this trajectory. Variation in these parameters tends to be correlated with changes in an individual’s behaviour. However, until now, these variations have provided little information on the time dimension of trajectories.

Read more (in french)

Reference :

Analysis of temporal patterns in animal movement networks

Cristian Pasquaretta, Thibault Dubois, Tamara Gomez-Moracho, Virginie Perilhon Delepoulle, Guillaume Le Loc’h, Philipp Heeb & Mathieu Lihoreau

Methods in Ecology and Evolution, January 2020. DOI: 10.1111/2041-210X.13364

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