Modelling and Analysis of Individual Animal Movement

Modelling and Analysis of Individual Animal Movement

Understanding the way in which animals move has important applications in animal behaviour, welfare and ecology.

Movement ecology is the established field concerned with understanding and predicting the spatial characteristics of movement. However, the methodologies employed in movement ecology have important uses in a variety of fields including movement strategies in robotics, information spread in the social sciences, epidemiology and particle dynamics.

Whilst movement is a complex process reliant on many internal and external stimuli, simple models such as random walks are often used in analysing, predicting, and understanding movement. Discrete random walks are commonly used due to their relative simplicity and the nature of telemetry data being recorded as a discrete-time series, and have been used to describe and analyse the behaviour of a wide range of animals, from the small and micro-scale movements of cells & bacteria to the large and macro displacements of elk & whales.

The development of tracking technology over the last 15-20 years has led to an explosion of accurate and accessible data, allowing us to record not just 2-/3-dimensional location data but also other conspecifics such as pressure, heart rate, temperature etc. However, the methods for accurately and usefully analysing such data sets are widespread and often not suited for such large datasets.

In this talk we will introduce the field of movement ecology, focusing on random walk methods used to analyse movement data as well as discussing some current problems and opportunities in the field and beyond.

Speaker

Joe Bailey, University of Essex

How to attend

If not a member of the Dept. Mathematical Science at the University of Essex, you can register your interest in attending the seminar and request the Zoom’s meeting password by emailing Dr Osama Mahmoud (o.mahmoud@essex.ac.uk).