Marine

New publication about how seabirds feed underwater

January 15, 2016 by Marine Scotland Communications No Comments | Category Collaborations, Marine Directorate Science

It has always been difficult to describe what diving seabirds do underwater – how deep they dive, how they forage and catch their prey. It is important to know about this, for example to assess the risk that underwater renewable energy turbines may present to the birds.

In a new publication, The use of an unsupervised learning approach for characterizing latent behaviours in accelerometer data, which includes contributions from Marine Scotland Science colleagues, the use of tags containing accelerometers as a powerful tool for studies on animal behaviour, energetics and movements is explored .

Accelerometer data has been used from two species of diving seabird (guillemot and razorbill), anticipated to have contrasting foraging behaviours. The publication shows how an unsupervised statistical learning algorithm is able to clearly analyse the complex information on movement in three dimensions provided by the tags to identify distinct phases of behaviour above and below water. It also shows how the accelerometer data allows exploration of previously unstudied and important behaviours such as searching and prey chasing/capture events.

This new statistical approach provides an ideal tool for the systematic analysis of such complex multi-variable movement data obtained with accelerometer tags.

Further Information

• Read the full publication: The use of an unsupervised learning approach for characterizing latent behaviours in accelerometer data by Marianna Chimienti, Thomas Cornulier, Ellie Owen, Mark Bolton, Ian M. Davies, Justin M.J. Travis & Beth E. Scott. (The paper is open access).

Comments