An Integrated Time-Varying Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process for Jointly Modeling Individual and Population-Level Dynamics of Golden Eagles

Music City Center 

With technological advancements, the quantity and quality of animal movement data has increased greatly. Currently, there is no existing movement model that can be used to describe full year of migratory species data that leverages both individual movement data and species distribution data. Herein we propose a full-year stochastic differential equation model for jointly modeling both individual movement data and species distribution data. We show that this joint model, under certain assumptions, results in efficient computation of the spatio-temporal dynamics of the entire population, and thus provides straightforward inference on the species distribution data. We illustrate this model with 215 bird-years of golden eagle movement in western North America and data from eBird for the species distribution.

Ecology

Animal movement modeling

Bayesian statistics

Migratory birds

Landscape ecology

GPS data 

Section on Statistics and the Environment