Delineating important killer whale foraging areas using a spatiotemporal logistic model

Conservation management planning for highly mobile species requires an understanding of the distribution of areas that are biologically important to the species of concern. Collecting data on the locations of animal behaviors linked to biological characteristics, such as foraging, can be used to spatially describe biological important areas. However, spatial modeling of free-ranging animal behavior can be challenging, as behavioral observations of animals are often clustered, and sampling is commonly conducted at a higher frequency than changes in behavioral states, resulting in data that are usually highly autocorrelated in space and time. Here, we fit latent Gaussian process models to observational behavioral data to generate spatially-explicit predictions of foraging behavior within the critical habitat of an endangered population of fish-eating killer whales (Orcinus orca) in southern British Columbia, Canada, and northern Washington State, USA. We compare spatial models treating te..., , , # Delineating important killer whale foraging areas using a spatiotemporal logistic model

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zcrjdfnm9](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zcrjdfnm9)

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