Background

 

In recent years, the versatile class of hidden Markov models (HMMs) has proven to be a very natural and increasingly popular statistical tool for the analysis of animal behaviour data collected over time. Ecological data to which HMMs have been successfully applied include:

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• movement data

• general behaviour data

• capture-recapture data

• accelerometer data

• distance sampling data

• occupancy data

However, the immense flexibility of HMMs makes it difficult to develop user-friendly yet general software packages that would put ecologists in a position to easily analyse their data themselves. As a consequence, ecologists faced with increasingly complex animal behaviour data are still very much dependent on support from statisticians with expertise in HMM methodology.

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Why EcoHMM?

The EcoHMM group pools the expertise of a number of individuals, primarily statisticians, who are experienced in the application of HMMs to ecological data. Our motivation for creating this virtual research group and website was

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• to provide a first port of call for ecologists seeking help with an HMM-based analysis of their data,

• to collect HMM literature as well as software recommendations in a central place,

• to organise, synthesise and advocate general method development in this area,

• and to inform the community about current research activities, workshops, conferences etc.

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Our hope is that both the statisticians affiliated with EcoHMM and ecologists will benefit from this forum, with hopefully many research collaborations being stimulated!

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Getting in touch

Do you have ecological time series data which you think may be calling for the use of HMMs? Then contact us and we'll see and discuss if we can help you. We look forward to working with you on some exciting data sets!