Evaluating methods for estimating home ranges using GPS collars: A comparison using proboscis monkeys (Nasalis larvatus)

The development of GPS tags for tracking wildlife has revolutionised the study of home ranges, habitat use and behaviour. Concomitantly, there have been rapid developments in methods for estimating habitat use from GPS data. In combination, these changes can cause challenges in choosing the best met...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2017-03, Vol.12 (3), p.e0174891-e0174891
Main Authors: Stark, Danica J, Vaughan, Ian P, Ramirez Saldivar, Diana A, Nathan, Senthilvel K S S, Goossens, Benoit
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activity patterns
Animal behavior
Animals
Anthropogenic factors
Aquaculture
Autocorrelation
Biology and Life Sciences
Boundaries
Buildings
Cell size
Climatology
Cognitive ability
Collars
Colobinae - physiology
Competition
Conservation
Data processing
Deer
Density
Earth Sciences
Ecology
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Ecosystem
Engineering and Technology
Environments
Estimates
Feasibility studies
Feeding
Foraging behavior
Forests
Fragmentation
Geographic Information Systems
Global Positioning System
Global positioning systems
GPS
Habitat fragmentation
Habitat selection
Habitat utilization
Habitats
Home range
Hulls
Human influences
Information systems
Intervals
Logging
Mammals
Methods
Motivation
National parks
Nests
Physical Sciences
Physiological aspects
Position (location)
Predation
Primates
Proboscis monkey
Ranging behavior
Research and Analysis Methods
Rivers
Satellite navigation systems
Sensors
Smoothing
Social factors
Social organization
Studies
Sympatric populations
Tagging
Telemetry
Tracking
Tropical environment
Weather
Wildlife
Wildlife radiolocation
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Summary:The development of GPS tags for tracking wildlife has revolutionised the study of home ranges, habitat use and behaviour. Concomitantly, there have been rapid developments in methods for estimating habitat use from GPS data. In combination, these changes can cause challenges in choosing the best methods for estimating home ranges. In primatology, this issue has received little attention, as there have been few GPS collar-based studies to date. However, as advancing technology is making collaring studies more feasible, there is a need for the analysis to advance alongside the technology. Here, using a high quality GPS collaring data set from 10 proboscis monkeys (Nasalis larvatus), we aimed to: 1) compare home range estimates from the most commonly used method in primatology, the grid-cell method, with three recent methods designed for large and/or temporally correlated GPS data sets; 2) evaluate how well these methods identify known physical barriers (e.g. rivers); and 3) test the robustness of the different methods to data containing either less frequent or random losses of GPS fixes. Biased random bridges had the best overall performance, combining a high level of agreement between the raw data and estimated utilisation distribution with a relatively low sensitivity to reduced fixed frequency or loss of data. It estimated the home range of proboscis monkeys to be 24-165 ha (mean 80.89 ha). The grid-cell method and approaches based on local convex hulls had some advantages including simplicity and excellent barrier identification, respectively, but lower overall performance. With the most suitable model, or combination of models, it is possible to understand more fully the patterns, causes, and potential consequences that disturbances could have on an animal, and accordingly be used to assist in the management and restoration of degraded landscapes.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0174891