Data, R Code, and Output Supporting: A “How-to” Guide for Estimating Animal Diel Activity Using Hierarchical Models

Abstract

This repository contains data, code, and associated output supporting work presented in "Iannarilli F., Gerber B. D., Erb J., and Fieberg J. R. (2024). A “How-to” Guide for Estimating Animal Diel Activity Using Hierarchical Models. Journal of Animal Ecology". We provide a series of .Rmd files that can be compiled to form a step-by-step tutorial demonstrating how to quantify animal activity patterns from time-stamped data using trigonometric and cyclic cubic spline hierarchical models. These models can accommodate site-to-site variability in the frequency of site use and timing of activity, while accounting for sampling effort. The text is accompanied by a series of examples in which we address common ecological questions related to the study of animal diel activity, such as the shape of the underlying activity pattern (unimodal, bimodal, or cathemeral) and the effect of covariates or the co-occurrence of other species on activity patterns. An HTML version of this tutorial is available at https://hms-activity.netlify.app/.