Set to work on rattlesnake home range parameters. It appears the two most widely used software/extensions (For ArcView/ArcMap) are Animal Movement Extension (Hooge and Eichenlaub 1997/2000), Geospacial Modelling Environment (GME; Beyer 2012/2015) or Home Range Extension.
Anyone with experience using any or all of these extensions/software have any comments or suggestions?
Thanks.
Hi Jared,
You could use adehabitatHR (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/adehabitatHR/vignettes/adehabitatHR.pdf) in R. It is pretty easy to use to fit many models.
Best,
Jose
I used GME for creating rattlesnake MCPs and found it to be useful and straightforward.
Thanks, Jose. I have seen previous papers use adehabitatHR and have read about it a bit. One thing that I am not clear on (and I suppose I could read the package summary) is that does is easily calculated kernal densities, both 95 and 50%?
Thanks, Sasha. From what I can see in recent herp literature, that GME is becoming a more popular tool to use for MCP and KD.
I used a prior version of adehabitat, and if I remember correctly there's a lot of flexibility in setting parameters, including what levels of KDEs to calculate (50%, 90%, 95%, etc). The package can output rasters for display in ArcGIS.
Many moons ago I also used the HomeRangeTools (HRT) extension for ArcMap 9.x, but I'm not sure if that's still current anymore.
I'm not familiar with the newer GIS packages, but it's important to understand what settings any packages use for KDEs, such as the kernel bandwidth (reference, least-squares cross validation[LSCV]), etc. The formerly popular Hawth's Tools defaulted to LSCV, which doesn't always perform well with really clumpy home range data. This was the case when I analyzed horned lizard home ranges, so I went with the reference bandwidth.
I prefer using Ranges (Anatrack, http://www.anatrack.com/home.php), and then you could also use rhr (Signer, J., & Balkenhol, N. (2015). Reproducible home ranges (rhr): A new, user-friendly R package for analyses of wildlife telemetry data. Wildlife Society Bulletin, n/a-n/a. doi: 10.1002/wsb.539).
And of course adehabitat...
Dear Jared,
I second everything Julien said. If you know R or can afford the time to learn from the vignettes of the packages, use R (but indeed it would be critical to know what you want to do to direct you more precisely). If you don't know R, just have a few HR to compute, and you are fine with location-based kernel HR estimate (which are generally ok for a set of independent locations), you may want to try this:
https://cybernar.shinyapps.io/HRApp/
which we made at the lab for user-friendly simple HR estimation (Credits go to C. Bernard). It's an online app, it runs R adehabitatHR package in the background, will allow you to play with the smoothing parameter, and you can select the %UD you want to get. You can export a shapefile of your UD.
Best,
simon
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