Data for: Love thy neighbour: feral buffalo show greater space use, resource overlap and encounters during the wet season in the Northern Territory

The code, data, and R objects in this repository accompany a paper titled 'Love thy neighbour: feral buffalo show greater space use, resource overlap and encounters during the wet season in the Northern Territory'.

In this paper we used spatially explicit movement models to understand buffalo movement and social behaviour to provide decision support to wildlife managers. We used continuous time movement models to produce autocorrelated kernel density estimates of buffalo home ranges and encounter space from 126,567 locations from 17 buffalo GPS tracked from November 2018 to April 2019. We compared the movement, space use and social behaviour of buffalo between the wet and dry season of the Djelk area, when resource availability is vastly different in the wetland areas of the Northern Territory. Results from these models can be used by land holders, traditional owners, and wildlife managers to make evidence-based decisions to optimize buffalo management in respect to disease risk, sustainable harvest, and damage to environmental and cultural assets.

The R Markdown, and accompanying data detail the modelling process from data pre-processing, fitting home ranges, comparing home range overalp and estimating social encounter area for the buffalo over three seasonal periods. Estimating home ranges can be computationally taxing and re-creating home range estimates for each buffalo can take several hours depending on the computing power of the user so intermediate outputs have also been included.