I have location data for multiple individuals' choices of foraging locations (x and y coordinates). What is the best way to test whether or not individuals vary significantly in where they chooses to forage?
There are many ways to formalize difference between individuals. In a recent study, we used roaming entropy to quantify differences in the roaming behavior of mice and found that these differences are correlated with neurogenesis in the hippocampus. Essentially, roaming entropy is the entropy of the spatial distribution representing the whereabouts of a mouse. More information can be found here:
Freund, J., Brandmaier, A. M., Lewejohann, L., Kirste, I., Kritzler, M., Krüger, A., Sachser, N., Lindenberger, U., & Kempermann, G. (2013). Emergence of individuality in genetically identical mice. Science, 340(6133), 756-759. doi:10.1126/science.1235294
If you want to know where they chose to go, you can look at the spatial distributions of their locations and compare those. Several methods are available for the comparison of spatial distributions, e.g.
http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2307/2265656
or
http://www.innovativegis.com/basis/Books/MapAnalysis/TofC_with_links.htm
Alternatively, you could define specific target points/areas and measure how close they were on average to these target points/areas, e.g.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hipo.22148/abstract
Hope that helps.
Thank you all so much for your suggestions. I will take a few days to go over them all and then get back to you if I have and further questions. Ida
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