ANIMAL SEARCH STRATEGIES: A QUANTITATIVE RANDOM-WALK ANALYSIS

Recent advances in spatial ecology have improved our understanding of the role of large-scale animal movements.However, an unsolved problem concerns the inherent stochasticity involved in many animal search displacements and its possible adaptive value.When animals have no information about where targets (i.e., resource patches, mates, etc.) are located, different random search strategies may provide different chances to find them.Assuming random-walk models as a necessary tool to understand how animals face such environmental uncertainty, we analyze the statistical differences between two random-walk models commonly used to fit animal movement data, the Le ´vy walks and the correlated random walks, and we…

• FD
  Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Alagoas
• CN
  Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico