[tlocoh-info] Dealing w/ multiple datasets

[Thomas Janke]

Andy,



My name is Thomas Janke. I am a graduate student at Sul Ross State University in west Texas working for the Borderlands Research Institute. Over the past 3 years, I have been monitoring the movements and survival of reintroduced desert bighorn sheep to part of their historic range. Now comes time for the analysis and writing.



After diving into past research and methodology, I knew I wanted to do more than just create and compare MCPs or KDEs to begin describing my research. Which brings me to you and your T_LoCoH software. I believe it is great y'all were able to create a software package that incorporates time into the analysis.



I am new to this software, but am willing to do what it takes to become more familiarized with it and be able to incorporate it into my data analysis. I have read your dissertation, your Home Range Plus publication, and the overview of the T_LoCoH program, along with following through with the example sets. Now its time for me to start analyzing my data.



We conducted 2 consecutive releases (2010 & 2011) for this restoration effort. I currently have data from 54 GPS collars, with data collection ranging from <1wk to >2yrs. Over the course of the study, we used 3 different types of collars (all of which have differing data formats). The 2010 released collars collected data in Lat/Long and were programmed to obtain a location every 3 hours. The 2011 released collars collected data in UTMs and were programmed to collect a location every 5 hours.



I would ultimately like to compare the movements and UDs by release year, sex, and time of year (ecological seasons). I would also like to use the GPS data to see if there are any preferred habitats (e.g. slope, aspect, terrain ruggedness, etc.) for the previously mentioned comparisons. It would also be great to be able to delineate 'travel corridor(s)' from the GPS data (esp. the sheep that were documented crossing international borders).



How do I need to go about entering and analyzing all of my data? Is there a way to compute an 's', and an 'a or k' value that can be used on all of the sheep, or will I have to determine individual values? If I am able to combine the data sets, how to I need to go about the different coordinate systems? How do I deal with differing data set sizes (e.g. 1 month compared to 2 years) or collars that had different acquisition rates?



Any help you're able to give would be most appreciated.



Thanks and have a good one,





Thomas




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