Running on empty: recharge dynamics from animal movement data

Dr. Mevin Hooten
Professor
Dept of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation
Biology and Statistics
Colorado State University

Vital rates such as survival and recruitment have always been important in the study of population and community ecology.  At the individual level, physiological processes such as energetics are critical in understanding biomechanics and movement ecology and also scale up to influence food webs and trophic cascades. Although vital rates and population-level characteristics are tied with individual-level animal movement, most statistical models for telemetry data are not equipped to provide inference about these relationships because they lack the explicit, mechanistic connection to physiological dynamics. I will present a framework for modeling telemetry data that explicitly includes an aggregated physiological process associated with decision making and movement in heterogeneous environments. This framework accommodates a wide range of movement and physiological process specifications.  As an example, a specific model formulation in continuous-time will be presented to provide direct inference about gains and losses associated with physiological processes based on movement. The approach can also be extended to accommodate auxiliary data when available. We demonstrate the model to infer wild felid and ungulate recharge dynamics.

Everyone is welcome to the seminar. If you would like to meet with the speaker, please email Dr. Brian Buma at brian.buma@ucdenver.edu