Data from: Information-theoretic analysis of realistic odor plumes: what cues are useful for determining location?

Many species rely on olfaction to navigate towards food sources or mates.
Olfactory navigation is a challenging task since odor environments are
typically turbulent. While time-averaged odor concentration varies
smoothly with the distance to the source, instaneous concentrations are
intermittent and obtaining stable averages takes longer than the typical
intervals between animals’ navigation decisions. How to effectively sample
from the odor distribution to determine sampling location is the focus on
this article. To investigate which sampling strategies are most
informative about the location of an odor source, we recorded three
naturalistic stimuli with planar lased-induced fluorescence and used an
information-theoretic approach to quantify the information that different
sampling strategies provide about sampling location. Specifically, we
compared multiple sampling strategies based on a fixed number of coding
bits for encoding the olfactory stimulus. When the coding bits were all
allocated to representing odor concentration at a single sensor,
information rapidly saturated. Using the same number of coding bits in two
sensors provides more information, as does coding multiple samples at
different times. When accumulating multiple samples at a fixed location,
the temporal sequence does not yield a large amount of information and can
be averaged with minimal loss. Furthermore, we show that
histogram-equalization is not the most efficient way to use coding bits
when using the olfactory sample to determine location.