In this article, Laube and Purves explore the influence of temporal scale on the analysis of ecological movement data. In particular, they vary temporal granularity and record the effects on various movement parameters (speed, direction, periodicity) for a high temporal resolution cow trajectory dataset.
Their results show that assessment of these parameters was inconsistent between scales, meaning that the determined speed of the cows depended largely on how finely resolved the timesteps taken were. Thus in general, researchers should be explicit about the temporal scale and range of their analysis; failing to do so could lead to unclear or irreproducible results.
I think in some sense Laube and Purves boil the problem down into two. First, a ‘coastline paradox’ style problem where varying the temporal unit of measurement (e.g. of speed) leads to different speed estimates, though presumably at some point the trajectory lengths tend towards a finite limit in a more meaningful sense than they do for lengths of coastline. Secondly, at smaller temporal scales, uncertainty in GPS measurements become significant. Navigating and accounting for these issues present a challenge and opportunity for GIScientists.
-slumley