RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 ctmmweb: A graphical user interface for autocorrelation-informed home range estimation
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.05.11.087932
DO 10.1101/2020.05.11.087932
A1 Justin M. Calabrese
A1 Christen H. Fleming
A1 Michael J. Noonan
A1 Xianghui Dong
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/05/12/2020.05.11.087932.abstract
AB Estimating animal home ranges is a primary purpose of collecting tracking data. All conventional home range estimators in widespread usage, including minimum convex polygons and kernel density estimators, assume independently sampled data. In stark contrast, modern GPS animal tracking datasets are almost always strongly autocorrelated. This incongruence between estimator assumptions and empirical reality leads to systematically underestimated home ranges. Autocorrelated kernel density estimation (AKDE) resolves this conflict by modeling the observed autocorrelation structure of tracking data during home range estimation, and has been shown to perform accurately across a broad range of tracking datasets. However, compared to conventional estimators, AKDE requires additional modeling steps and has heretofore only been accessible via the command-line ctmm R package. Here, we introduce ctmmweb, which provides a point-and-click graphical interface to ctmm, and streamlines AKDE, its prerequisite autocorrelation modeling steps, and a number of additional movement analyses. We demonstrate ctmmweb’s capabilities, including AKDE home range estimation and subsequent home range overlap analysis, on a dataset of four jaguars from the Brazilian Pantanal. We intend ctmmweb to open AKDE and related autocorrelation-explicit analyses to a wider audience of wildlife and conservation professionals.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.