Double‐tagging scores of seabirds reveals that light‐level geolocator accuracy is limited by species idiosyncrasies and equatorial solar profiles

作者：Luke R. Halpin, Jeremy D. Ross, Raül Ramos, Rowan Mott, Nicholas Carlile, Nick Golding, José Manuel Reyes‐González, Teresa Militão, Fernanda De Felipe, Zuzana Zajková, Marta Cruz‐Flores, Sarah Saldanha, Virginia Morera‐Pujol, Leia Navarro‐Herrero, Laura Zango, Jacob González‐Solís, Rohan H. Clarke · 发表于：Methods in Ecology and Evolution · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1111/2041-210x.13698 · 被引用次数：53 · 研究领域：Avian ecology and behavior、Wildlife Ecology and Conservation、Marine animal studies overview

Abstract Light‐level geolocators are popular bio‐logging tools, with advantageous sizes, longevity and affordability. Biologists tracking seabirds often presume geolocator spatial accuracies between 186 and 202 km from previously innovative, yet taxonomically, spatially and computationally limited, studies. Using recently developed methods, we investigated whether assumed uncertainty norms held across a larger‐scale, multispecies study. We field‐tested geolocator spatial accuracy by synchronously deploying these with GPS loggers on scores of seabirds across five species and 11 Mediterranean Sea, east Atlantic and south Pacific breeding colonies. We first interpolated geolocations using the geolocation package FLightR without prior knowledge of GPS tracked routes. We likewise applied another package, probGLS , additionally testing whether sea‐surface temperatures could improve route accuracy. Geolocator spatial accuracy was lower than the ~200 km often assumed. probGL S produced the best accuracy (mean ± SD = 304 ± 413 km, n = 185 deployments) with 84.5% of GPS‐derived latitudes and 88.8% of longitudes falling within resulting uncertainty estimates. FLightR produced lower spatial accuracy (408 ± 473 km, n = 171 deployments) with 38.6% of GPS‐derived latitudes and 23.7% of longitudes within package‐specific uncertainty estimates. Expected inter‐twilight period (from GPS position and date) was the strongest predictor of accuracy, with increasingly equatorial solar profiles (i.e....