Continuous time resource selection analysis for moving animals

1. Resource selection analysis (RSA) seeks to understand how spatial abundance covaries with environmental features. By combining RSA with movement, step selection analysis (SSA) has helped uncover the mechanisms behind animal relocations, thereby giving insight into the movement decisions underlying spatial patterns. However, SSA typically assumes that at each observed location, an animal makes a `selection' of the next observed location. This conflates observation with behavioural mechanism and does not account for decisions occurring at any other time along the animal's path.

2. To address this, we introduce a continuous time framework for resource selection. It is based on a switching Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) model, parameterised by Bayesian Monte Carlo techniques. Such OU models have been used successfully to identify switches in movement behaviour, but hitherto not combined with resource selection. We test our inference procedure on simulated paths, representing both migr...