Analysis of movement recursions to detect reproductive events and estimate their fate in central place foragers
Abstract
Recursive movement patterns have been used to detect behavioral structure within individual movement trajectories in the context of foraging ecology, home-ranging behavior, and predator avoidance. Some animals exhibit movement recursions to locations that are tied to reproductive functions, including nests and dens; while existing literature recognizes that, no method is currently available to explicitly target different types of revisited locations. Moreover, the temporal persistence of recursive movements to a breeding location can carry information regarding the fate of breeding attempts, but it has never been used as a metric to quantify recursive movement patterns. Here, we introduce a method to locate breeding attempts and estimate their fate from GPS-tracking data of central place foragers. We tested the performance of our method in three bird species differing in breeding ecology (wood stork (Mycteria americana), lesser kestrel (Falco naumanni), Mediterranean gull (Ichthyaetus melanocephalus)) and implemented it in the R package ‘nestR’.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jun 03, 2020
- Source ID
- 10.1186/s40462-020-00201-1
Entities
People
- Brian J. Smith
- Diego Rubolini
- Jacopo G. Cecere
- Lorenzo Serra
- Mathieu Basille
- Matthew E. Boone
- Peter C. Frederick
- Rena R. Borkhataria
- Simona Picardi
- Simone Pirrello
Organizations
- European Commission
- Everglades Foundation
- National Institute of Food and Agriculture
- National Park Service
- United States Army Corps of Engineers
- United States Environmental Protection Agency
- United States Fish and Wildlife Service