write a note on the different types of body converings in animals.
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ABSTRACT
There is long-standing scientific interest in understanding purposeful movement by animals and humans. Traditionally, collecting data on individual moving entities was difficult and time-consuming, limiting scientific progress. The growth of location-aware and other geospatial technologies for capturing, managing and analyzing moving objects data are shattering these limitations, leading to revolutions in animal movement ecology and human mobility science. Despite parallel transitions towards massive individual-level data collected automatically via sensors, there is little scientific cross-fertilization across the animal and human divide. There are potential synergies from converging these separate domains towards an integrated science of movement. This paper discusses the data-driven revolutions in the animal movement ecology and human mobility science, their contrasting worldviews and, as examples of complementarity, transdisciplinary questions that span both fields. We also identify research challenges that should be met to develop an integrated science of movement trajectories.
Introduction
Among the traits shared by animals and humans is intentional movement through space to perform activities. These purposeful movements are fundamental to the dynamics of ecosystems, cities and environments. Consequently, there is a long-standing scientific concern with analyzing and interpreting intentional movement in both basic and applied research. Ecologists and biologists study animal movement patterns to understand behaviors such as habitat selection, migration, territoriality, foraging and mating, and also to understand responses to environmental changes. Human mobility researchers, spanning disciplines such as geography, anthropology, transportation, urban planning and public health, are concerned with how humans move through natural and built environments to conduct required and desired activities such as working, shopping, recreation and socializing, how to plan transportation and cities to facilitate mobility and accessibility, and the impacts of mobility on the environment, health, social capital and well-being. For years, animal movement and human mobility researchers struggled with scarce data on movement behavior, relying on painstaking data collection (e.g. observational studies, mark-recapture, travel diaries) and/or aggregate data (e.g. seasonal distribution maps, origin-destination flows, intercept counting). This is changing due to stunning advances in location-aware technologies (LATs) for moving objects data (MOD) collection, such as global positioning system (GPS) data recorders, mobile phones, radiofrequency identification (RFID) chips, geotags, radiolocation devices and georeferenced social media (González et al. 2008, Giannotti et al. 2011, Batty 2012, Kays et al. 2015). These technologies facilitate the collection of massive individual-level mobility databases on animal and human movement patterns. For example, Figure 1 shows 546,502 GPS points for 55 individual turkey vultures (Cathartes aura). Individual tracks cover observation periods of 1 month to 11 years, ~2 years per bird on average, during November 2003–December 2016. The image includes individuals from both South and North American populations conducting seasonal migrations to and from Venezuela and the Northern Amazon Region (data can be accessed through Bildstein et al. 2016, more details about the dataset in Dodge et al. 2014). Figure 2 shows 2,678,893 GPS points for 536 humans (Homo sapiens) over individual one-week time periods in 2013, around Salt Lake City, Utah, USA (data provided by the authors). Complementing the growth of individual movement data is the increasing availability of contextual data about the movement environment via embedded and remote sensors, crowd-sourced observational networks and global reanalysis data (Stefanidis and Nittel 2004, Trenberth et al. 2008, Heipke 2010). A third converging and complementary trend is the rise of geosimulation techniques that can model large systems such as cities, ecosystems and societies at the level of the individual entities that comprise these systems (Benenson and Torrens 2004).
Background
This section discusses the technological advances that are creating a revolution in animal movement ecology and human mobility science. It also describes the interdisciplinary research communities that have evolved separately within each domain. To illustrate the potential synergy from converging animal and human movement research, this section concludes by illustrating several transdisciplinary research questions that span both domains.
