Alternative applications of ctmm package

[Meaghan Rupprecht]

Hello,

I am currently working on a project with nested spatial data and I am trying to determine if the ctmm package could be applied to my research. The intent of ctmm seems to be for telemetry products used on animals, so my data would be a little non-conventional.

Some background on the structure of my data:

- the data includes records of fishing trips taken within a region of Brazil

-each record has a unique boat id that is associated with it

-each unique boat belongs to a larger fleet of boats (thus, nested data)

-each fishing trip is associated with a latitude and longitude of fishing location, and a date

I had successfully calculated home range estimates using kde() from the adehabitatHR package, but there is no way to account for the correlation occurring at the individual boat level (a unique boat may frequently visit the same fishing location).

I am looking for a home range estimator that can correct for this correlation while still giving me a home range at the fleet level. In my mind, this seems similar to calculating a home range for herd or pack animals while accounting for correlation at an individual level, if that makes sense. 

Since the data is not formatted in the same way that the telemetry objects are for the Movebank data, I am wondering if I can format my data in a way which the akde() function from ctmm could still work and give me autocorrelated home range calculations for each fleet.

I greatly appreciate any help you can offer.

Best,

Meaghan

[Christen Fleming]

Hi Meaghan,

It seems very reasonable to try. You should at least be able to see what the temporal autocorrelation looks like in the individual fishing trip locations. Then for the population-level density estimate we have the new pkde() function.

There are some details given on the data format in help('as.telemetry'): https://ctmm-initiative.github.io/ctmm/reference/as.telemetry.html

Best,

Chris