APPM Department Colloquium - Mevin Hooten

De Motu Animalium:  Modern Models for Animal Trajectories 

Advances in animal telemetry data collection techniques have served as a catalyst for the creation of statistical methodology for analyzing animal movement data.  Such data and methodology have provided a wealth of information about animal space use and the investigation of individual-based animal-environment relationships.  While the technology for data collection is improving dramatically over time, we are left with massive archives of historical animal telemetry data of varying quality.  However, many contemporary statistical approaches for inferring movement behavior are designed for newer data that are very accurate and high-resolution.  From a scientific perspective, the behaviors we are interested in learning about may be complicated, nonstationary, and constrained.  Furthermore, telemetry data often contain substantial measurement error and can be nonelliptically distributed.  I provide a brief overview of the history of statistical models for animal movement and present an accessible framework for accommodating the inherent characteristics of Lagrangian movement processes and uncertainty associated with telemetry data.