@article {Sakamoto055905, author = {Takuto Sakamoto and Lloyd Sanders and Nobu Inazumi}, title = {Composite Brownian Walks Best Describe Livestock Mobility Patterns across Species}, elocation-id = {055905}, year = {2016}, doi = {10.1101/055905}, publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory}, abstract = {In quantitative studies on animal movements and foraging, there has been ongoing debate over the relevance of L{\'e}vy walk and related stochastic models to understanding mobility patterns of diverse organisms. In this study, we collected and analyzed a large number of GPS logs that tracked the movements of different livestock species in northwestern Kenya. Statistically principled analysis has only found scant evidence for the scale-free movement patterns of the L{\'e}vy walk and its variants. Instead, the analysis has given strong support to composite exponential distributions (composite Brownian walks) as the best description of livestock movement trajectories in a wide array of parameter settings. Furthermore, this support has become overwhelming and near universal under an alternative criterion for model selection. These results illuminate the multi-scale and multi-modal nature of livestock spatial behavior. They also have broader theoretical and empirical implications for the related literature.}, URL = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/27/055905}, eprint = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/27/055905.full.pdf}, journal = {bioRxiv} }