Authors: Paul C Cross Tyler G Creech Michael R Ebinger Dennis M Heisey Kathryn M Irvine Scott Creel
Publish Date: 2012/07/12
Volume: 66, Issue: 10, Pages: 1437-1447
Abstract
Recent technological advances such as proximity loggers allow researchers to collect complete interaction histories day and night among sampled individuals over several months to years Social network analyses are an obvious approach to analyzing interaction data because of their flexibility for fitting many different social structures as well as the ability to assess both direct contacts and indirect associations via intermediaries For many network properties however it is not clear whether estimates based upon a sample of the network are reflective of the entire network In wildlife applications networks may be poorly sampled and boundary effects will be common We present an alternative approach that utilizes a hierarchical modeling framework to assess the individual dyadic and environmental factors contributing to variation in the interaction rates and allows us to estimate the underlying process variation in each In a disease control context this approach will allow managers to focus efforts on those types of individuals and environments that contribute the most toward superspreading events We account for the sampling distribution of proximity loggers and the nonindependence of contacts among groups by only using contact data within a group during days when the group membership of proximity loggers was known This allows us to separate the two mechanisms responsible for a pair not contacting one another they were not in the same group or they were in the same group but did not come within the specified contact distance We illustrate our approach with an example dataset of female elk from northwestern Wyoming and conclude with a number of important future research directionsThis work was supported by the Wyoming Wildlife–Livestock Disease Partnership National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health Ecology of Infectious Disease Grant DEB1067129 Wyoming Game and Fish Department and the US Geological Survey Any use of trade product or firm names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the US Government We thank B Scurlock J Rogerson E Maichak J Henningsen D Damm A Williams A Barbknecht and A Roosa for their assistance in the field D Stinson assisted with aerial flights Animals were under the Montana State University animal use and care protocol 201002
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