Determining how animals move within their environment is a fundamental knowledge that contributes to effective management and conservation.

In our latest video, David Jacoby and Edd Brooks explain how their paper brings together two disparate and rapid advancing fields: biotelemetry and social networking analyses.

In a paper recently published in Methods, David, Edd and colleagues Darren Croft and David Sims, demonstrate some of the descriptive and quantitative approaches for determining how an animal’s movement interconnects home range habitats. David and colleagues describe the novel application of network analyses to electronic tag data whereby nodes represent locations and edges between nodes, the movements of individuals. They consider both local and global network properties from an
animal movement perspective and simulate the effects of node disruption as a proxy for habitat disturbance.

Network theory is a well-established theoretical framework and its integration into the fast
developing field of animal movement and telemetry might improve significantly how we interpret animal space use from electronically recorded data.

Related

• Developing a deeper understanding of animal movements and spatial dynamics through novel application of network analyses
  by David Jacoby, Edd Brooks, Darren Croft and David Sims
• Marine Biological Association of the UK
• University of Exeter
• Cape Eleuthera Institute
• University of Plymouth
• More Methods author videos and podcasts