Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 6 Two groups of ringmaps showing movement behaviour of female possum (#6012) and
her interaction with habitat in Muriwai, New Zealand over 8 nights in 2008. Each ring represents
a night and each sector represents a 5-min interval during the night
exotic pine plantations (Pinus spp.) during autumn and winter (from March to
August). These seasonal changes likely reflect variations in the availability of
principal food resources. At the nightly scale, the possum clearly exhibited tem-
poral variation in use of habitat, reflecting the tendency of the species to regularly
commute from favored den sites to preferred foraging areas. The habitat colour-
coded timelines and the geographic background image located in the center of the
ringmap provide references to geographical space. Coordinated and interactive
visualisation among rings and timelines can facilitate recognition of linkages
among space, time and other variables.
Figure
7
suggests that there is a significant seasonal variation in habitat use, so
we aggregated the data for two seasons, summer and autumn, because they have
the most information available for further investigation of seasonal changes
(Fig.
8
).
Figure
8
shows a different means of displaying temporally explicit information
associated with the timelines of moving animals. Here we see marked seasonal
patterns of habitat use during the summer and autumn: manuka and kanuka bush is
strongly preferred during summer, while pine and native forest are heavily used in
