Numeerisen analyysin ja laskennallisen
tieteen seminaari
7.3.2005 klo
14.15
U322
Otso Ovaskainen, Helsingin
Yliopisto, Metapopulation Research Group
Estimating
habitat-specific movement parameters from mark-recapture data
When a biologist is interesting in measuring the movements of
individuals (such as butterflies), she usually conducts a
mark-recapture study. A fundamental problem in the analysis of spatial
mark-recapture data is that the observed movement pattern depends not
only on the properties of the species but also on the structure of the
landscape, and on the design of the study. This can be overcome by
parameterizing a movement model that accounts for the structure of the
landscape. Assuming that the organism performs a (correlated) random
walk, a plausible model is given by diffusion in a domain that may
consist of several habitat types. The caveat is that the problem
becomes computationally demanding, as the likelihood of the data needs
to be constructed from a time-dependent solution to the diffusion
equation. I illustrate how the estimation can be done using
finite-element methods in combination with adaptive Bayesian modeling.