Theses and Dissertations

Author

Zoë Johnson

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Barton, Brandon

Committee Member

Dapper, Amy

Committee Member

Street, Garrett

Date of Degree

8-7-2020

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Biological Sciences

Degree Name

Master of Science

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Biological Sciences

Abstract

In a heterogenous environment, an animal will increase its search effort in areas where resources are abundant. This behavior can be detected in a path by a decrease in speed, an increase in tortuosity, or both. First passage time, the amount of time required for an animal to traverse a circle of a given radius, or buffer, is a common metric for quantifying spatial and temporal changes along a path. Historical methodology involving first passage time limits the utility of this metric. Here we instead follow the methodology put forth by Street et al. (2018) and use a power-law model to characterize the relationship between first passage time and the scale of the first passage time buffer radii. We then test the model’s applicability across multiple movement modes using simulated data and further explore its utility by applying it to a dataset of deer movement and the associated landscape data.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/18454

Comments

movement||ecology||movement ecology||first passage time||white-tailed deer||wildlife managment

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