Dear Animovers,

Thank you for the many suggestions.  I have been trying to implement several, 
but keep running into problems.

1.  The LoCoH analysis seems to be the most promising method of analyzing my 
data, especially since I have both coastal boundaries and many of the species I 
work on seem to have migratory corridors.  However, I tried analyzing my data 
for five different settings of "a" and nine different animals.  Each animal has 
approximately 432000 data points (once/second for 5 days).  After letting it 
run for 48 hours I had to stop it to work on another project.  Is LoCoH really 
that computationally difficult or did I do something wrong?  I am using a Dell 
Precision 390 running Windows XP SP3 with 2 GB RAM.  Any idea how long the 
analysis should take?  My code was:

homerange<-NNCH(xy,a=c(100,200,300,400,500),id=id)

2.  I loaded qGIS and have a semi-working version.  However, I have tried to 
use the Home Range plugin and keep getting an error message.  I posted it on 
the qGIS forum (http://forum.qgis.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4914).  I think qGIS 
isn't communicating with R, but have no idea why.  I would appreciate any 
suggestions you have on how to get the pluging to work correctly.

3.  I haven't had time to try Damiano or Clement's asc based methods yet, but 
will be looking for a nice rasta map of the area we are working in to try them 
out.  While I think the LoCoH method will give a better home range estimate for 
a lot of our animals, I will still need to produce kernel UD's for comparisons 
to other studies.  I especially appreciate the demo code and the explanation in 
"fishy" terms.  

Aloha,

Tim

Tim Clark
Department of Zoology 
University of Hawaii


> Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:26:20 +0200
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [AniMov] Clipping area from home range
> estimates
> To: Animal Movement <[email protected]>
> Message-ID: <[email protected]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
> 
> >
> > I am trying to use Adehabitat to analyze the home
> range and movement
> > patterns of fish (manta rays, sharks, and various
> species of reef
> > fish) in Hawaii, but have not found a way to clip land
> area out of
> > the animals home range.  Most of the fish I study
> stay fairly close
> > to shore, moving along a sinuous coastline.  I
> have used adehabitat
> > to estimate their home range (I am mostly interested
> in kernel
> > HR's), but need to either limit the calculations to
> only include
> > water areas during the calculation or clip out the
> land area after
> > the kernel has been calculated.  Is there a way
> to use a shapefile
> > or other projected map file to either limit the kernel
> or to clip
> > out the area post-processing?  I am fairly new to
> R and adehabitat,
> > and am working in Windows. 
> 
> 
> Actually, the main issue with the (classical) kernel method
> is that it
> does not allow boundary constraints. I have heard about
> extensions of
> the kernel method allowing to take into account boundary
> extensions,
> but they are not implemented in adehabitat (and I do not
> remember the
> corresponding references) . If your aim is just to estimate
> a home
> range (i.e. if an utilization distribution is not desired),
> and if you
> do not want to compare your results with previous
> home-range sizes
> estimated in the literature, the kernel method is probably
> not the
> best choice (as noted by Maren, NNCH would probably be a
> better
> choice, as it fits more closely the relocations). 
> 
> However, if you really need to estimate a kernel home
> range, I may
> suggest you a tricky solution: to estimate the UD for each
> animal,
> then to set the UD to 0 in the pixels located outside the
> water, to
> standardise the modified UD so that the volume under the UD
> is equal
> to 1, and finally to estimate the home range from this
> modified UD.
> 
> mhm... Ok... not that clear. I take an example (just copy
> and paste to
> R):
> 
> ## prepare the data
> data(puechabon)
> locs <- puechabon$locs[,c("Name","X","Y")]
> map <- getkasc(puechabon$kasc, 1)
> 
> ## show the data
> image(map)
> points(locs[,c("X","Y")], col=as.numeric(locs$Name))
> 
> 
> This map shows the relocations of four wild boars on an
> elevation
> map. But imagine that they represent the location of four
> fishes in a
> lake (unmapped white areas - NA on this map - are
> corresponding to the
> land). Consider the red and black points: they are close to
> the
> shore. If we estimate a home range, a large proportion of
> the home
> range will cover the land:
> 
> 
> ## Note here that we use the map as the grid on which the
> UD is
> ## estimated
> kud <- kernelUD(locs[,c("X","Y")], locs$Name, grid=map)
> ver <- getverticeshr(getvolumeUD(kud))
> plot(ver, add=TRUE)
> 
> 
> So a possible way would be to set to zero all the pixels of
> the UD
> located on the land, and then to standardise the result.
> That is:
> 
> for (i in 1:length(kud)) {
>     kud[[i]]$UD[is.na(map)] <- 0
>     kud[[i]]$UD <-
> kud[[i]]$UD/(sum(kud[[i]]$UD)*(attr(map, "cellsize")^2))
> }
> ver2 <- getverticeshr(getvolumeUD(kud))
> 
> 
> And the resulting home range is:
> 
> image(map)
> points(locs[,c("X","Y")], col=as.numeric(locs$Name))
> plot(ver2, add=TRUE)
> 
> the home range does not cover the land. And the point is
> that the
> object kud represents the UD corrected so that the land is
> characterized by a probability of occurrence equal to zero
> (i.e., it
> is not the home range that is corrected, but the UD). But
> this
> solution implies that you are able to derive a raster map
> from your
> shapefile where land is represented by NA. Another
> alternative,
> already pointed out by Paolo would be to use a GIS (such 
> as qGIS) to clip the home-range polygons after the
> estimation.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> 
> Cl?ment Calenge
> -- 
> Cl?ment CALENGE
> Office national de la chasse et de la faune sauvage
> Saint Benoist - 78610 Auffargis
> tel. (33) 01.30.46.54.14
> 
> 
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> End of AniMov Digest, Vol 46, Issue 4
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