Biology subjects

Bijleveld, A. I.

Publications and source records attributed to Bijleveld, A. I..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

In the face of competition, imperfect knowledge can lead to sustainable exploitation of a shared resource.

Overexploitation of a shared resource is a frequent phenomenon among groups of selfish consumers, known as the tragedy of the commons. To avoid "self-damage through self-interest", humans may either defend exclusive access to resources, or collectively adopt advanced cooperative behaviour and carefully designed spatial harvesting strategies to exploit a shared resource sustainably. However, why do many non-human species that are neither social nor territorial also appear to avoid overexploiting resources? This study shows that, even under highly competitive scenarios, cooperation is not necessary to sustainably exploit shared resources if individuals have imperfect knowledge about the distribution of those resources. Poorly informed individuals are more likely to inadvertently exploit resources in peripheral habitats, which may allow for higher resource renewal in the nearby and low-cost habitats, enhancing the sustainability of resource use. As a result, those consumers can achieve a long-term yield that approaches that of cooperative consumers and is higher than omniscient consumers. Ironically, while there might be an evolutionary drive for individuals to make well-informed decisions, consumers of shared resources may be collectively more prosperous when they make decisions based on less information. These findings might explain why apparently sub-optimal consumer behaviour appears so prevalent in nature.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2021

WATLAS: high resolution and real-time tracking of many small birds in the Dutch Wadden Sea

BackgroundTracking animal movement is important for understanding how animals interact with their (changing) environment, and crucial for predicting and explaining how animals are affected by anthropogenic effects. The Wadden Sea is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a region of global importance for millions of small shorebirds. Due to climate change and anthropogenic activity, understanding and predicting movement and space-use in areas like the Wadden Sea is increasingly important. Monitoring and predicting animal movement, however, requires high-resolution tracking of many individuals. While high-resolution tracking has been made possible through GPS, trade-offs between tag weight and battery life limit its use to larger species. MethodsHere, we introduce WATLAS (the Wadden Sea deployment of the ATLAS tracking system) capable of monitoring the movements of hundreds of (small) birds simultaneously in the Dutch Wadden Sea. WATLAS employs an array of receiver stations that can detect and localise small, low-cost tags at fine spatial (meters) and temporal resolution (seconds). From 2017-2021, we tracked red knots, sanderlings, bar-tailed godwits, and common terns. We use parts of these data to give four examples on its performance and how WATLAS can be used to study numerous aspects of animal behaviour, such as, space-use (both intra- and inter-specific), among-individual variation, and social networks. ResultsAfter describing the WATLAS system, we first illustrate space-use of red knots across the study area and how the tidal environment affects their movement. Secondly, we show large among-individual differences in distances travelled per day, and thirdly illustrate how high-throughput WATLAS data allows calculating a proximity-based social network. Finally, we demonstrate that using WATLAS to monitor multiple species can reveal differential space use. For example, despite sanderlings and red knots roosting together, they foraged in different areas of the mudflats. ConclusionsThe high-resolution tracking data collected by WATLAS offers many possibilities for research into the drivers of bird movement in the Wadden Sea. WATLAS could provide a tool for impact assessment, and thus aid nature conservation and management of the globally important Wadden Sea ecosystem.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2021

Validating a high-throughput tracking system: ATLAS as a regional-scale alternative to GPS

O_LIFine-scale tracking of animal movement is important to understand the proximate mechanisms of animal behaviour. While GPS tracking is an excellent tool for measuring animal movement, trade-offs between tag weight, cost and lifespan limit its application to relatively large species, a small number of individuals or short tracking durations, respectively. The reverse-GPS system - ATLAS - uses lighter, cheaper tags compared to GPS tags, that can also last long periods of time at high sampling frequencies. Six systems are now operational worldwide and have successfully tracked over 50 species in various landscape types. This growing use of ATLAS to track animal movement motivates further refinement of best-practice application and an assessment of its accuracy. C_LIO_LIHere, we test the accuracy and precision of the largest ATLAS system, located in the Dutch Wadden Sea using concurrent GPS measurements as a reference. This large-scale ATLAS system consists of 26 receivers and covers 1326 km2 of intertidal region, with almost no physical obstacles for radio signals, providing a useful baseline for other systems. To measure accuracy, we calculated the distance between ATLAS and GPS location estimates for a route (mobile test) and 16 fixed locations (stationary test) on the Griend mudflat. C_LIO_LIATLAS-derived location estimates differed on average 4.2 m from GPS-estimated stationary test sites and 5.7 m from GPS tracks taken whilst moving between them. Signals that were collected by more receiver stations were more accurate, although even 3-receiver localisations were comparable with GPS localisations ([~]10 m difference). Higher receiver stations detected the tag at longer distances. C_LIO_LIFuture ATLAS users should consider the height of receivers, their spatial arrangement, density and the movement mode of the study species (e.g., ground-dwelling or flying). In conclusion, ATLAS provides an accurate, regional-scale alternative to global GPS-based tracking with which hundreds of relatively small-bodied species can be tracked simultaneously for long periods of time. Our study shows that ATLAS is a valid alternative, providing comparable location estimates to GPS. C_LI

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

A Guide to Pre-Processing High-Throughput Animal Tracking Data

O_LIModern, high-throughput animal tracking studies collect increasingly large volumes of data at very fine temporal scales. At these scales, location error can exceed the animals step size, leading to mis-estimation of key movement metrics such as speed. Cleaning the data to reduce location errors prior to analyses is one of the main ways movement ecologists deal with noisy data, and has the advantage of being more scalable to massive datasets than more complex methods. Though data cleaning is widely recommended, and ecologists routinely consider cleaned data to be the ground-truth, inclusive uniform guidance on this crucial step, and on how to organise the cleaning of massive datasets, is still rather scarce. C_LIO_LIA pipeline for cleaning massive high-throughput datasets must balance ease of use and computationally efficient signal vs. noise screening, in which location errors are rejected without discarding valid animal movements. Another useful feature of a pre-processing pipeline is efficiently segmenting and clustering location data for statistical methods, while also being scalable to large datasets and robust to imperfect sampling. Manual methods being prohibitively time consuming, and to boost reproducibility, a robust pre-processing pipeline must be automated. C_LIO_LIIn this article we provide guidance on building pipelines for pre-processing high-throughput animal tracking data in order to prepare it for subsequent analysis. Our recommended pipeline, consisting of removing outliers, smoothing the filtered result, and thinning it to a uniform sampling interval, is applicable to many massive tracking datasets. We apply this pipeline to simulated movement data with location errors, and also show a case study of how large volumes of cleaned data can be transformed into biologically meaningful residence patches, for quick biological inference on animal space use. We use calibration data to illustrate how pre-processing improves its quality, and to verify that the residence patch synthesis accurately captures animal space use. Finally, turning to tracking data from Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus), we demonstrate the pre-processing pipeline and residence patch method in a fully worked out example. C_LIO_LITo help with fast implementation of standardised methods, we developed the R package atlastools, which we also introduce here. Our pre-processing pipeline and atlastools can be used with any high-throughput animal movement data in which the high data-volume combined with knowledge of the tracked individuals movement capacity can be used to reduce location errors. The atlastools function is easy to use for beginners, while providing a template for further development. The use of common pre-processing steps that are simple yet robust promotes standardised methods in the field of movement ecology and leads to better inferences from data. C_LI

ecology↗