RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Composite Brownian Walks Best Describe Livestock Mobility Patterns across Species
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 055905
DO 10.1101/055905
A1 Takuto Sakamoto
A1 Lloyd Sanders
A1 Nobu Inazumi
YR 2016
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/27/055905.abstract
AB In quantitative studies on animal movements and foraging, there has been ongoing debate over the relevance of Lévy walk and related stochastic models to understanding mobility patterns of diverse organisms. In this study, we collected and analyzed a large number of GPS logs that tracked the movements of different livestock species in northwestern Kenya. Statistically principled analysis has only found scant evidence for the scale-free movement patterns of the Lévy walk and its variants. Instead, the analysis has given strong support to composite exponential distributions (composite Brownian walks) as the best description of livestock movement trajectories in a wide array of parameter settings. Furthermore, this support has become overwhelming and near universal under an alternative criterion for model selection. These results illuminate the multi-scale and multi-modal nature of livestock spatial behavior. They also have broader theoretical and empirical implications for the related literature.