Abstract
Abstract Passive acoustic telemetry provides the opportunity to monitor and contextualize the movements of diverse aquatic animals. Despite depth being an essential dimension along which many processes are organized, the Eulerian structure of the acoustic telemetry data (movements perceived from fixed locations) and the consequences of sound propagation in water hinders the incorporation of the vertical dimension into animal’s space use analyses. Here, we propose a new data‐driven quantitative method to estimate 3D space use from telemetry networks. The methodology is based on simulating large numbers of stochastic synthetic paths, accommodating the detection probability around receivers and the depth information from transmitters and integrating the local topography. The methodological protocol is explained in detail and tested with acoustic telemetry data from the common dentex Dentex dentex in a Mediterranean marine protected area. We present 3D space use estimations for the tagged individuals and compare them with other 3D and 2D estimations derived with existing probabilistic methods. 3D space use estimations that incorporate topography provided a more comprehensive view of the movement ecology of tracked individuals, with relevant pieces being missed by 2D representations. Our method generated realistic representations of the actual spatial co‐occurrence of individuals, including the spatio‐temporal identification of relevant aggregation areas.
Highlights
Animal movement has been traditionally studied in a two-dimensional (2D) domain, often omitting the vertical dimension, which is essential for the activity of many organisms
The relevance of the vertical dimension is especially conspicuous in aquatic environments, where almost every environmental factor varies with depth, generating sharp ecological gradients that affect species distribution and the potential space use of mobile organisms (Kitagawa et al, 2000; Aspillaga et al, 2017)
Animals tagged with acoustic transmitters are monitored by a network of receivers placed at fixed locations in the study area (Heupel, Semmens, & Hobday, 2006), and movement is perceived in an Eulerian mode as presences, absences, or transitions between discrete locations
Summary
Animal movement has been traditionally studied in a two-dimensional (2D) domain, often omitting the vertical dimension, which is essential for the activity of many organisms (e.g. aquatic, flying, arboreal, or burrowing; Belant, Millspaugh, Martin, &Gitzen, 2012). Animal movement has been traditionally studied in a two-dimensional (2D) domain, often omitting the vertical dimension, which is essential for the activity of many organisms The relevance of the vertical dimension is especially conspicuous in aquatic environments, where almost every environmental factor varies with depth, generating sharp ecological gradients that affect species distribution and the potential space use of mobile organisms (Kitagawa et al, 2000; Aspillaga et al, 2017). Animals tagged with acoustic transmitters are monitored by a network of receivers placed at fixed locations in the study area (Heupel, Semmens, & Hobday, 2006), and movement is perceived in an Eulerian mode as presences, absences, or transitions between discrete locations. The uncertainty regarding the position of tagged animals is usually large (hundreds of meters), as it depends on the distance at which acoustic signals are detectable (i.e. the detection range)
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