Quantifying drivers of wild pig movement across multiple spatial and temporal scales

Area of Science:

• Movement ecology
• Wildlife behavior
• Spatial ecology

Background:

• Animal movement is influenced by factors across multiple spatio-temporal scales.
• Understanding these drivers is key for ecology, distribution prediction, disease dynamics, and conservation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and apply an analytical framework to assess animal movement patterns across multiple scales.
• To quantify the effects of various factors on wild pig movement across different temporal scales.

Main Methods:

• Utilized over 400,000 GPS locations from 13 studies on wild pigs across six southern U.S. states.
• Employed a generalized additive mixed model to analyze movement rates and home range size.
• Examined predictor effects (individual, geographic, landscape, meteorological, temporal) across daily, monthly, and overall study periods.

Main Results:

• Meteorological variables, distance to water, ecoregion, and sex-age class significantly influenced wild pig movement.
• The impact and nature of these factors varied across different temporal scales (daily, monthly, long-term).

Conclusions:

• The presented framework allows for assessing movement patterns from diverse data sources, accounting for spatio-temporal correlations.
• Highlighting the critical importance of defining appropriate temporal scales for movement response and covariates in research.
• Emphasizing that integrated analysis of multiple spatial scales provides more accurate cross-scale effect quantification.