Dear Ecolog, We would like assistance with predicting the location of animals 'tomorrow' based on where they are today or have been in the recent past. Our question is, "if I know where this animal is today, or know where this animal has spent the past 5 days, where will it be tomorrow?"
We conduct (almost) daily monitoring of Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) on an active Air Force range and have data for a number of years. Some of the Pronghorn we monitor are radio-collared; these animals provide us with specific locations over multiple days that we could use for time-series modeling. Other animals are not marked, thus their daily movements are mostly unknown but can be guess-timated. An option suggested to us is a predictive time series algorithm, but we don't know how to operationalize that idea. Another option we considered is using the mean (+/- SE) distance traveled by marked animals between consecutive days; this would give us an estimate of how far a Pronghorn may travel from one day to the next but not the direction. If you have useful insight about predicting animal movements, please contact me at [email protected] (do not reply directly to the email this request came from) Thank you in advance, John John Arnett Wildlife Biologist Environmental Science Management 56th Range Management Office 7101 Jerstad Lane, Building 500 Luke Air Force Base, AZ 85309-1647
