Home range estimation under a restricted sampling scheme

Abstract

The analysis of animal movement has gained attention recently, and new continuous-time models and statistical methods have been developed. All of them are based on the assumption that this movement can be recorded over a long period of time, which is sometimes infeasible, for instance when the battery life of the GPS is short. We prove that the estimation of its home range improves if periods when the GPS is on are alternated with periods when the GPS is turned off. This is illustrated through a simulation study, and real life data. We also provide estimators of the stationary distribution, level sets (which provides estimators of the core area) and the drift function.