Animal Space Use

In light of the recent insight that individuals of a population generally seem to utilize their environment in a multi-scaled and even scale-free manner, the metapopulation concept needs a critical evaluation. Even more so, since many animals under a broad range of ecological conditions are simultaneously mixing scale-free space use with memory map-based site fidelity. In fact, both properties, multi-scaled movement and targeted return events to previous locations, undermine key assumptions of the metapopulation concept. Levins (1969) model of “populations of populations” – termed metapopulation – rattled many corners of theoretical and applied ecology, despite previous knowledge of the concept from the groundbreaking research by Huffaker (1958) and others (Darwin, Gause, etc.). Since then, Ilkka Hanski (1999) and others have produced broad theoretical and empirical research on the metapopulation concept. The Levins model describes a metapopulation in a spatially implicit manner, w...

Ideally, when studying ecological aspects of an individual’s whereabouts based on (for example) series of GPS fixes, N should not only be large. The series of fixes should also be non-autocorrelated to ensure statistically independent samples of space use. Since these two goals are difficult to fulfill simultaneously (the latter tend to undermine the former), two workarounds are common. Either the autocorrelation issue is ignored albeit recognized, or space use is analyzed by path analytical methods rather than the more classical use-availability approach. Both workarounds have drawbacks. In this post I show for the first time a surprisingly simple method to compensate for the oversampling effect that leads to autocorrelated series of fixes. Again, as in Part II of this series, I focus on how to improve realism and reduce the statistical error term when studying ecological aspects of habitat selection, given that data compliance with the MRW framework has been verified (see, for exa...