engleski

Satellite telemetry as a tool to distinguish types of brown bear movements.

Satellite telemetry provides locations of collared brown bears which are precise enough and frequent enough to interpret their movements in quite sophisticated ways. We used the 2-hour spaced locations (GPS/GSM) for nine European brown bears (four females, five males) to define the types of their activities based on the movement patterns. “Hidden Markov model” (Rabiner, L. R. 1989. A tutorial on hidden Markov models and selected applications in speech recognition, IEEE, 77/2, 257- 286) was used to detect travelling, foraging and bedding movement modes considering straight line distances between consecutive locations and the turning angles. The results fit with previous knowledge and showed that bears in Croatia exhibit predominately nocturnal behavior: they travelled an average of 500 m distance at night and 200 m during the day per two hour intervals. More activity was shown in summer and spring: average of 500 m distance travelled in summer and spring comparing to average of 300 m and 200 m travelled during the autumn and winter, respectively per two hours intervals. Males traveled 20% more than females. Travelling mode was dominant at night (64% of night-time) and was decreasing during the day (22% of day-time), while the bedding and foraging modes were the opposite (13% and 23% of night- time to 27% and 50% of day-time, respectively). Presented results do exhibit the potential of exploiting GPS bear location data through "hidden Markov model" and obtain additional understanding and even predictions of bear movements.

Brown bear, telemetry, satellite.

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