Using transient encounter rates to quantify spatial patterns of home-range organization

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Surendran, Anudeep, Calabrese, Justin M., Fagan, William F., Martinez-Garcia, Ricardo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915555559079936
author Surendran, Anudeep
Calabrese, Justin M.
Fagan, William F.
Martinez-Garcia, Ricardo
author_facet Surendran, Anudeep
Calabrese, Justin M.
Fagan, William F.
Martinez-Garcia, Ricardo
contents Encounters between individuals underlie key ecological processes such as predation, mating, and disease transmission, making encounter rates a direct link between individual movement behavior and population-level outcomes. We investigate how two common features of animal movement--directional persistence and range residency--jointly shape encounter rates. Using the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck with foraging (OUF) model, which integrates these two properties of animal movement, we derive exact analytical expressions for encounter rates and show that, for range-resident animals, the effect of persistence depends strongly on the degree of home-range overlap. Based on this theoretical result, we then introduce a new encounter-based metric that quantifies the spatial organization of home ranges at scales relevant to animal encounters. We finally apply this metric to movement data from lowland tapirs ($\textit{Tapirus terrestris}$) in Brazil's Pantanal region and find a significant level of home-range spatial segregation, consistent with the solitary behavior of this species.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_13017
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Using transient encounter rates to quantify spatial patterns of home-range organization
Surendran, Anudeep
Calabrese, Justin M.
Fagan, William F.
Martinez-Garcia, Ricardo
Populations and Evolution
Encounters between individuals underlie key ecological processes such as predation, mating, and disease transmission, making encounter rates a direct link between individual movement behavior and population-level outcomes. We investigate how two common features of animal movement--directional persistence and range residency--jointly shape encounter rates. Using the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck with foraging (OUF) model, which integrates these two properties of animal movement, we derive exact analytical expressions for encounter rates and show that, for range-resident animals, the effect of persistence depends strongly on the degree of home-range overlap. Based on this theoretical result, we then introduce a new encounter-based metric that quantifies the spatial organization of home ranges at scales relevant to animal encounters. We finally apply this metric to movement data from lowland tapirs ($\textit{Tapirus terrestris}$) in Brazil's Pantanal region and find a significant level of home-range spatial segregation, consistent with the solitary behavior of this species.
title Using transient encounter rates to quantify spatial patterns of home-range organization
topic Populations and Evolution
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13017