Sakar and al. Animal Movement.

This paper focuses on movement data from barnacle goose migration patterns. By using migration hotspots with periodicity and directionality from these hotspots they are able to establish the movement patterns of these geese. I’m not sure if geese have a need for privacy but if they do, attaching GPS trackers to them would definitely be an invasion of privacy. This study also highlights the relationship between location information and information about an individual/animal quite well. Location information is a critical piece of information about the identity of what’s moving.

I thought this paper was very well written; I am left with very few questions bout the effectiveness of the methods. Notably, the paper accounts for the effect of weather and ecological stresses from certain hotspots that affect the movement of the geese. Considering that these stresses have already affected movement, it would be interesting to see how the migration patterns will be affected on a longer timeframe. Will urbanization, climate change, atmospheric conditions continue to alter these patterns over time?

Written in 2015, this paper is well up to date in terms of the algorithms, clustering methods and GPS devices used. It would be interesting to compare and contrast the migration of other geese (perhaps the Canada goose) using the same tracking methods. Perhaps there would be fundamental law’s of goose travel that would become more apparent.

Comments are closed.