Analyzing variation in yearly movement patterns of golden eagles using archetypal analysis
We have obtained a dataset containing the telemetry locations of 68 golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) in the western United States. We use R language to plot and analyze the animal movement data using archetypal analysis. Archetypal analysis aims to represent observations in a multivariate data set as convex combinations of extreme points. We adopted the archetypal analysis to observe and analyze the migration routes of different animals in different regions and years. We used Dirichlet regression to model the archetype weights as a function of individual and the individual’s approximate age. The result shows that the ages of different animals have a non-significant effect on their moving route. In contrast, variation in migration strategies is significantly different between individuals.