title: Lévy meets poisson: a statistical artifact may lead to erroneous recategorization of Lévy walk as Brownian motion.
abstract: The flow of GPS data on animal space is challenging old paradigms, such as the issue of the scale-free Lévy walk versus scale-specific Brownian motion. Since these movement classes often require different protocols with respect to ecological analyses, further theoretical development in this field is important. I describe central concepts such as scale-specific versus scale-free movement and the difference between mechanistic and statistical-mechanical levels of analysis. Next, I report how a specific sampling scheme may have produced much confusion: a Lévy walk may be wrongly categorized as Brownian motion if the duration of a move, or bout, is used as a proxy for step length and a move is subjectively defined. Hence, the categorization and recategorization of movement class compliance surrounding the Lévy walk controversy may have been based on a statistical artifact. This issue may be avoided by collecting relocations at a fixed rate at a temporal scale that minimizes over- and undersampling.
authors: Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, Department of Biology, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1066 Blindern, NO-0316 Oslo, Norway. a.o.gautestad@bio.uio.no
authors: Arild O
authors: AO
authors: Gautestad
mesh_terms: D063147:Animal Distribution / Q000502:physiology*; D000818:Animals; D008954:Models, Biological; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology*