A new index for measuring perpendicularity of animal movements in relation to patch boundaries

作者：Aho Ken A^*; Long Ryan A; Kie John G; Bowyer R Terry

来源：Ecological Modelling, 2010, 221(17): 2003-2007.

DOI：10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2010.06.006

• Perpendicularity
• Patch
• Animal movement
• R

We introduce a new index for measuring perpendicularity of animal movements with respect to a boundary (e.g., a habitat patch edge), and provide a computer algorithm for its calculation. Our index, eta, improves on an approach that measures perpendicularity with respect to a fixed boundary direction. This is because eta accounts for moment-to-moment trajectories relative to nearest-neighbor boundary attributes at the scale of an animal's movement. Our algorithm prp calculates eta efficiently and accurately with both synthetic data and large telemetry datasets. In addition, we have included routines in prp which account for scenarios inherently problematic to perpendicularity estimators.

• 出版日期2010-8-24