Habitual Route Analysis Method (HRAM)

Abstract

The Habitual Route Analysis Method (HRAM) tool automates the analysis method to evaluate the existence of habitual routes present within navigational data. A habitual route is based on the animal uses of repeated routes and route segments. The constantly repetition of segments comprising the habitual route an animal use during a period of time. HRAM identifies repeated route and route segments. It uses the daily travel vector to identify route repetitions. A route is the sequence of geographic coordinates by day. Thus, the input data is a line shapefile. The script begins by accepting daily routes organized by month. These daily routes are combined to create monthly routes. The tool isolates each daily route and converts it into a buffered zone based on the species’ sight range. Each daily route’s buffer is compared to the other monthly routes. When a route from another month intersects a daily route’s buffer, it is considered repeated. For example, if you are looking at April 1st’s route and May 2nd, July 31st, and January 4th are intersecting the buffer then April 1st is repeated three times. The tool outputs two shapefiles for every month, one file with the month name, for example “april” which is the daily route and the attribute table shows how many times each daily routes was repeated. Another output is a shapefile for each month, which carry the name of the month plus segments. For example, for April the shapefile would be called “april_segments” which produces a attribute table with shows two fields: DAYNUM is the day the route was used and the REPEATED the day that route was repeated or the name of the route in the month which was buffered along with the name of each route that intersects its buffer. Sight Range This sight range is user input within the code since it varies based on the species and their environment. The unit of measurement is based on the input shapefile’s projection unit. For instance, if the inputted data is projected using NAD83(CSRS) / UTM zone 20N then the unit of measurement will be in meters. If the user inputs “300”, it will be used as “300 meters” for the sight range.