Using a Cost-Distance Time-Geographic Approach to Identify Red Deer Habitat Use in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada

Abstract

Animal movements are realizations of complex spatiotemporal processes. Central to these processes are the varied environmental contexts in which animals move, which fundamentally impact the movement trajectories of individuals at fine spatial and temporal scales. An emerging perspective in time geography is the direct examination of the influence that varying contexts may have on observed movements. An approach that considers environmental context can yield actionable information for wildlife management, planning, and conservation; for instance, identifying areas of probable occupancy by an animal may improve the efficiency of fieldwork. This research develops the first known practical application of a new cost-distance-based, probabilistic voxel space–time prism (CDBPSTP) in efforts to more realistically characterize the unobserved habitat occupancies of animals occurring between known positions provided by location-aware technologies. The CDBPSTP method is applied to trajectory data collected for a group of red deer (Cervus elaphus) tracked near Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada. As a demonstration of the added value from examining how context influences movement, CDBPSTP habitat occupancy results are compared to the earlier PSTP method in context with empirical and theoretical understandings of red deer habitat preference and space-use behaviors. This comparison reveals that with CDBPSTP, variation present in the mover’s environment is explicitly considered as an influence on the mover’s probable path and occupancies between observations of its location. With the increasing availability of high-resolution geolocational and associated environmental data, this study highlights the potential for CDBPSTP to be leveraged as a broadly applicable tool in animal movement analysis.