Abstract
Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite navigation receivers are increasingly being used in ecological and behavioural studies to track the movements of animals in relation to the environments in which they live and forage. Concurrent recording of the animal's foraging behaviour (e.g. from jaw movement recording) allows foraging locations to be determined. By combining the animal GPS movement and foraging data with habitat and vegetation maps using a Geographical Information System (GIS) it is possible to relate animal movement and foraging location to landscape and habitat features and vegetation types. This powerful approach is opening up new opportunities to study the spatial aspects of animal behaviour, especially foraging behaviour, with far greater precision and objectivity than before. Advances in GPS technology now mean that sub-metre precision systems can be used to track animals, extending the range of application of this technology from landscape and habitat scale to paddock and patch scale studies. As well as allowing ecological hypotheses to be empirically tested at the patch scale, the improvements in precision are also leading to the approach being increasing extended from large scale ecological studies to smaller (paddock) scale agricultural studies. The use of sub-metre systems brings both new scientific opportunities and new technological challenges. For example, fitting all of the animals in a group with sub-metre precision GPS receivers allows their relative inter-individual distances to be precisely calculated, and their relative orientations can be derived from data from a digital compass fitted to each receiver. These data, analyzed using GIS, could give new insights into the social behaviour of animals. However, the improvements in precision with which the animals are being tracked also needs equivalent improvements in the precision with which habitat and vegetation are mapped. This needs some degree of automation, as vegetation mapping at a fine spatial scale using the traditional manual approach is far too time consuming. This paper explores these issues, discussing new applications as well as approaches to overcoming some of the associated problems.
Highlights
Understanding the factors influencing the spatial aspects of the behaviour of domestic and wild animals, and how this spatial behaviour relates to the spatial aspects of the environment, has been and still is an important objective for both behavioural scientists and ecologists alike (Dumont & Gordon, 2003)
In order to study the spatial patterns of foraging, we need three sets of data: at any given point in time, we need to know the location of the animal, whether or not the animal is actively consuming food at that point in time, and what landscape features are at that location
The combination of automatic satellite navigation based animal tracking, the automatic recording of foraging behaviour and vegetation or habitat maps based on ground survey or aerial and/or satellite images allow these three data sets to be collected, and provide behavioural and ecological scientists and with a powerful tool for analysing spatial foraging behaviour and how it interacts with landscape and habitat features
Summary
ABSTRACT - Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite navigation receivers are increasingly being used in ecological and behavioural studies to track the movements of animals in relation to the environments in which they live and forage. By combining the animal GPS movement and foraging data with habitat and vegetation maps using a Geographical Information System (GIS) it is possible to relate animal movement and foraging location to landscape and habitat features and vegetation types This powerful approach is opening up new opportunities to study the spatial aspects of animal behaviour, especially foraging behaviour, with far greater precision and objectivity than before. Fitting all of the animals in a group with sub-metre precision GPS receivers allows their relative interindividual distances to be precisely calculated, and their relative orientations can be derived from data from a digital compass fitted to each receiver These data, analyzed using GIS, could give new insights into the social behaviour of animals. This paper explores these issues, discussing new applications as well as approaches to overcoming some of the associated problems
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