Deriving Animal Movement Behaviors Using Movement Parameters Extracted from Location Data

Abstract

We present a methodology for distinguishing between three types of animal movement behavior (foraging, resting, and walking) based on high-frequency tracking data. For each animal we quantify an individual movement path. A movement path is a temporal sequence consisting of the steps through space taken by an animal. By selecting a set of appropriate movement parameters, we develop a method to assess movement behavioral states, reflected by changes in the movement parameters. The two fundamental tasks of our study are segmentation and clustering. By segmentation, we mean the partitioning of the trajectory into segments, which are homogeneous in terms of their movement parameters. By clustering, we mean grouping similar segments together according to their estimated movement parameters. The proposed method is evaluated using field observations (done by humans) of movement behavior. We found that on average, our method agreed with the observational data (ground truth) at a level of 80.75% ± 5.9% (SE).