School of Natural Resource Sciences

Good afternoon. Thank you for asking me to be with you today; I welcome this opportunity to talk with you, to hear what you're thinking, and to participate with you in an exchange of ideas. I've been asked to make some prepared remarks this afternoon, and when those are ended I welcome your ideas, your questions, and your comments. I look forward to more discussions with you at other times, as well. I do have open hours Friday afternoons, and encourage faculty and staff to stop by to visit, to share an idea, to ask a question, or to just visit. Sometimes duties call me away, as they will for the next few Fridays, but I try to be available as many Friday afternoons as possible for drop-in visitors. I hope you'll be among them. As a big believer in the land grant university, with our mission of teaching, research, and extension education, I also am a big believer that it takes all of us, working together, to fulfill that mission.

A General Framework for the Analysis of Animal Resource Selection from Telemetry Data

We propose a general framework for the analysis of animal telemetry data through the use of weighted distributions. It is shown that several interpretations of resource selection functions arise when constructed from the ratio of a use and availability distribution. Through the proposed general framework, several popular resource selection models are shown to be special cases of the general model by making assumptions about animal movement and behavior. The weighted distribution framework is shown to be easily extended to readily account for telemetry data that are highly auto-correlated; as is typical with use of new technology such as global positioning systems animal relocations. An analysis of simulated data using several models constructed within the proposed framework is also presented to illustrate the possible gains from the flexible modeling framework. The proposed model is applied to a brown bear data set from southeast Alaska.