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[ianjonsen]

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[vheim]

Hello,

Currently, I am using aniMotum's fit_ssm() function to fit a correlated-random walk to Argos satellite tracking data. However, I have a question regarding the "min.dt" argument within the function and am not sure if I interpret this argument correctly. The documentation says: "minimum allowable time difference between observations; dt <= min.dt will be ignored by the SSM".

My first question is: what is the unit of the time difference, i.e. minutes, hours, days?

My second question is: does that mean, that if I specify mind.dt = 10, if I have two consecutive detections that are less than e.g. 10 hours (?) apart they will be ignored? What is the intention of the min.dt argument - can it help to increase the goodness of model fit? If so, based on the literature it seems that SSMs have more issues with long time gaps, so would it be useful to have an argument that allows to specify long time gaps that should be excluded from the analysis?

Thank you in advance!

Vital

[ianjonsen]

Hi,

The unit is seconds. min.dt exists because some Argos data sets can have observations very close together in time (0 - 5 s), min.dt was intended to remove these cases, which can otherwise sometimes cause model convergence failures. So, not really a goodness-of-fit improvement. Generally, you shouldn't need to change from the default, min.dt = 60.

Your point re: SSM having issues with long time gaps in the data is correct, however, I've left it for researchers to decide how they want to address that problem. For example, two simple approaches are: 1) split tracks based on some data gap duration criterion prior to fitting the SSM; 2) split tracks after fitting the SSM by removing SSM-predicted locations in the data gaps.

A future version of aniMotum will likely include an approach for handling data gaps.

Thanks for asking the question.

Ian

[vheim]

Hi Ian,

Perfect - thank you very much for your responses!

The min.dt argument makes sense now and I used the first suggestion, i.e. splitting up the track based on a gap duration threshold prior to fitting the SSM.

Best wishes,
Vital

[tamsin-milla]

Hi, I have noticed in the vignettes/Move_persistence_models.Rmd page that you mention the mp model can only be fit to individuals separately. At present I have fitted it to a data set which has compiled the tracks from multiple tagged individuals - would this be inaccurate then? Is there an alternative option to add all the individual move persistence estimates onto one figure?

[ianjonsen]

Hi, you can fit the model to multiple individuals in one call to fit_ssm() but, internally, this fits the model separately to each individual rather than simultaneously in a single, hierarchical model. So what you've done is fine.

[tamsin-milla]

Hi, I am wondering whether this package currently has the functionality to simulate tracks biased towards set environmental conditions (For example warmer temperatures?)

[ianjonsen]

Thanks for the question - it's something I've certainly thought about on multiple occasions. But, no, currently that is not possible with the simulation functions. It's not difficult to simulate such movement biases, but it is difficult to handle different spatially gridded environmental data sets in a generally applicable & relevant manner for as many species as possible. If there was enough interest - ie. enough people asking for this - some fairly simple tools could be introduced but this would be a year or two away.

[tamsin-milla]

Hey! I am wondering how to best integrate direct pathroutr functions, as currently I am running a mp model and then rerouting the points, but this will preserve the g values from the original modelling although rerouting might change these values?

[ianjonsen]

There's no simple way to do this if you're fitting the mp model to Argos data. You could extract the re-routed locations via grab(fit, what = "r") and then use fit_mpm to re-fit a move persistence model to the re-routed locations. This is not quite the same thing as fitting the mp model via fit_ssm, as it doesn't account for location uncertainty, so your mileage may vary.

[scifiona]

Hello Ian,

I am trying to find the right commands for mapping individual tracks. So, instead of having them all together on the same map, I'd like to inspect the tracks of every animal (id) individually.
In my dataset, there are 29 individuals, and it gets a little messy when it's all on the same map. I mean, it's great for an overview and also for the models, I think (because then they have more data to work with), but not if you want to check out the IDs individually.

What I did was to use the grab function and then just ggplotted every ID with a for loop, but then I missed out on all the nice features in the animotum package.

Any idea how to code this inside of animotum?

[ianjonsen]

Hi, the simplest way to do this would be via lapply or with one of the map functions in the purrr package. Using lapply, the approach would be something like this:

fit_lst <- split(fit, fit$id)

lapply(fit_lst, function(x) aniMotum::map(x, what = "p", ...))

this will render individual maps for each predicted track. If you want them in a single file, then you could use the pdf function, eg:

pdf(file = "maps.pdf")
lapply(fit_lst, function(x) aniMotum::map(x, what = "p", ...))
dev.off()

Hope that helps.

Ian