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Ecology letters
Mar, 2025;28 (3): e70092.

Estimating Spatially Explicit Survival and Mortality Risk From Telemetry Data With Thinned Point Process Models.

Joseph M Eisaguirre, Madeleine G Lohman, Graham G Frye, Heather E Johnson, Thomas V Riecke, Perry J Williams
Author Information
  1. Joseph M Eisaguirre: U.S. Geological Survey, Alaska Science Center, Anchorage, Alaska, USA. ORCID
  2. Madeleine G Lohman: Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, USA. ORCID
  3. Graham G Frye: Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska, USA.
  4. Heather E Johnson: U.S. Geological Survey, Alaska Science Center, Anchorage, Alaska, USA. ORCID
  5. Thomas V Riecke: Department of Ecosystem and Conservation Sciences, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana, USA. ORCID
  6. Perry J Williams: Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, USA. ORCID
PMID: 40028932 DOI: 10.1111/ele.70092

Abstract

Mortality risk for animals often varies spatially and can be linked to how animals use landscapes. While numerous studies collect telemetry data on animals, the focus is typically on the period when animals are alive, even though there is important information that could be gleaned about mortality risk. We introduce a thinned spatial point process (SPP) modelling framework that couples relative abundance and space use with a mortality process to formally treat the occurrence of mortality events across the landscape as a spatial process. We show how this model can be embedded in a hierarchical statistical framework and fit to telemetry data to make inferences about how spatial covariates drive both space use and mortality risk. We apply the method to two data sets to study the effects of roads and habitat on spatially explicit mortality risk: (1) VHF telemetry data collected for willow ptarmigan in Alaska, and (2) hourly GPS telemetry data collected for black bears in Colorado. These case studies demonstrate the applicability of this method for different species and data types, making it broadly useful in enabling inferences about the mechanisms influencing animal survival and spatial population processes while formally treating survival as a spatial process, especially as the development and implementation of joint analyses continue to progress.

Keywords

mortality risk movement ecology point process resource selection space use spatial statistics spatially explicit species distribution model survival telemetry

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Grants

  1. /U.S. Geological Survey
  2. /National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program
  3. /Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research Bonnycastle Fellowship for Wetland and Waterfowl Research

MeSH Term

Animals
Telemetry
Alaska
Ecosystem
Models, Biological
Mortality
Geographic Information Systems
Journal Article
Article has an altmetric score of 3

Word Cloud

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