What is it about?
Estimating proportion of time that two animals are in close proximity (i.e., in contact) is a fundamental aspect describing animal interaction. We make an overdue connection between existing literature on rule-based measures of animal interaction and statistical model-based literature on animal movement modeling from telemetry data. We outline the distribution theory for contact time between two animals and provide an illustration of contact time estimation for 1770 pairwise combinations of deer monitored in Western Kansas.
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Why is it important?
Contact time is a flexible and interpretable measure of animal interaction that is conveniently estimated from two animal movement models fit to telemetry data (i.e., recorded locations over time). There are many extensions of contact time estimation to the estimation of time spent near anthropogenic structures, various land cover types, and the historic path of other animals.
Perspectives
Telemetry data is a collection over recorded locations over time. Structurally, it is a simplistic type of data. However, there is great potential to describe behavior of animals from such data in a way that has broad applications in fields such as civil engineering, agriculture, and the environmental sciences. Contact time is a fundamental and interpretable measure that can be used by scientists and engineers to understand how animals spent their time. A statistical exposition on the subject of contact time estimation from telemetry data is long overdue, and provides increased support for those seeking to use telemetry data to make inferences about animal movement.
Andrew Whetten
Kansas State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Estimation of Contact Time Among Animals from Telemetry Data, The American Statistician, September 2024, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2024.2402264.
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