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Effective stewardship of Florida's coast requires, in part, detailed characterizations of ecological components of the marine system. Characterization of one component, manatees (Trichechus manatus latirostris), involves mapping its distribution and abundance and identifying features of the landscape that are intimately associated with its life history. In this study, we developed a raster-based spatial model that transformed radio-telemetry point data to surfaces illustrating the areas manatees visited frequently for relatively long periods, called “places,” and areas visited frequently for short periods, called “movement corridors.” This work involved (1) simulating manatee movement paths between sequential telemetry points using a cost surface based on manatee bathymetric preferences that were derived from empirical associations between telemetry locations and water depth, (2) distributing movement time to cells that were crossed by the simulated movement path, and (3) extracting cells from the movemen... |
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