DOI: 10.5061/dryad.c59zw3rc1
title: Examination of head versus body heading may help clarify the extent to which animal movement pathways are structured by environmental cues?

description: Understanding the processes that determine how animals allocate time to
 space is a major challenge, althoughit is acknowledged that summed animal
 movement pathways over time must define space-time use. The
 criticalquestion is then, what processes structure these pathways?
 Following the idea that turns within pathways mightbe based on
 environmentally determined decisions, we equipped Arabian oryx with head-
 and body-mounted tagsto determine how they orientated their heads – which
 we posit is indicative of them assessing the environment– in relation to
 their movement paths, to investigate the role of environment scanning in
 path tortuosity. Aftersimulating predators to verify that oryx look
 directly at objects of interest, we recorded that, during routinemovement,
 &gt; 60% of all turns in the animals’ paths, before being executed,
 were preceded by a change in headheading that was not immediately mirrored
 by the body heading: The path turn angle (as indicated by the bodyheading)
 correlated with a prior change in head heading (with head heading being
 mirrored by subsequent turnsin the path) twenty-one times more than when
 path turns occurred due to the animals adopting a body headingthat went in
 the opposite direction to the change in head heading. Although we could
 not determine what theobjects of interest were, and therefore the proposed
 reasons for turning, we suggest that this reflects the use ofcephalic
 senses to detect advantageous environmental features (e.g. food) or to
 detect detrimental features (e.g.predators). The results of our pilot
 study suggest how turns might emerge in animal pathways and we proposethat
 examination of points of inflection in highly resolved animal paths could
 represent decisions in landscapesand their examination could enhance our
 understanding of how animal pathways are structured.
description: Six Arabian oryx, from a herd of 12 semi-captive animals kept
 within a 0.5 X 0.5 km natural enclosure within the Imam Saud bin Abdulaziz
 Royal Nature Reserve (previously called Mahazat as-Sayd), a protected area
 located in west-central Saudi Arabia (41.58, 22.34), were equipped with
 head- and body-mounted tags (Daily Diary – standard model; http://www.wildbytetechnologies.com/tags.html) that recorded tri-axial acceleration at 40 Hz and tri-axial magnetic field intensity at 13 Hz using a real-time clock base. The head-mounted tags were glued between the horns while the body-mounted units were attached to a collar and weighted to hang ventrally. The collar also had a dorsally mounted GPS, set to determine location once every 15 mins. Although the real time clocks in the devices were reported to have maximum drift of no more than a few seconds per month, all units were calibrated to synchronize time properly. Tag heading were derived from both head- and collar-mounted tags, using the tilt-compendated compass method. The animals were then allowed to roam freely within their enclosure for 7 days. On day 3, we selected a single period of ca. 5 h of behaviour for each individual, during which the focal animals were predominantly moving, as indicated by Vectorial sum of the Dynamic Body Acceleration having values &gt;0.1 g. After recovery of the tags, the individual head- and body-headings from all animals for all periods were determined (using methods described in https://doi.org/10.1186/s40317-021-00245-z) as well as times when ‘significant turns’ in either metric occurred (using methods outlined in https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13056). This datset contains the animal heading (0-360°) and Vectorial sum of the Dynamic Body Acceleration (<em>g</em>) for both sets of tags per individual for the ca. 5 h of predominantly moving behaviour. The provided R code serves as an example for processing head and body headings, aimed at identifying 'significant turns' and quantifying the magnitude of heading change for each turn.
description: All data analysis was performed in R.
description: This README file was generated on 2023-11-01 by Richard Gunner. GENERAL
 INFORMATION 1. Title of Dataset: Examination of head versus body
 headingmay help clarify the extent to whichanimal movement pathways are
 structuredby environmental cues? 2. Corresponding Author Information Name:
 Richard Gunner Institution: Max Planck Institute ofAnimal Behavior
 Address: Konstanz, Germany Email: richard\.m\.g@hotmail\.com \|
 rgunner@ab\.mpg\.de 3. Date of data collection: Feb 2015 4. Geographic
 location of data collection: mam Saud bin Abdulaziz Royal Nature Reserve
 (previ-ously called Mahazat as-Sayd), a protected area located
 inwest-central Saudi Arabia (41.58, 22.34) 5. Information about funding
 sources that supported the collection of the data: his study was funded by
 researchers supporting project number RSPD2023R602 from King Saud
 University, the Deanship of Scientific Researchat the King Saud University
 through Vice Deanship of Research Chairs, theNational Geographic Global
 Exploration Fund, and the Royal Society/Wolfson Lab refurbishment scheme.
 SHARING/ACCESS INFORMATION 1. Licenses/restrictions placed on the data:
 MIT License 2. Links to publications that cite or use the data: Gunner,
 R.M., Wilson, R.P., Holton, M.D. et al. Examination of head versus body
 heading may help clarify the extent to which animal movement pathways are
 structured by environmental cues?. Mov Ecol 11, 71 (2023).
 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40462-023-00432-y 3. Links to other publicly
 accessible locations of the data: None 4. Links/relationships to ancillary
 data sets: https://doi.org/10.15131/shef.data.6605330 5. Was data derived
 from another source? No A. If yes, list source(s): NA 6. Recommended
 citation for this dataset: Gunner, R.M., Wilson, R.P., Holton, M.D. et al.
 Examination of head versus body heading may help clarify the extent to
 which animal movement pathways are structured by environmental cues?.
 Dryad Digital Repository. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40462-023-00432-y DATA
 & FILE OVERVIEW 1. File List: A)
 Oryx.Raw.Body\_Heading.Datasets.csv B)
 Computing\_head\_heading\_and\_body\_heading\_turn\_points\_and\_turn\_extents.R 2. Relationship between files, if important: B) is an exmaple R script for processing head and body headings, aimed at identifying 'significant turns' and quantifying the magnitude of heading change for each turn. This can be used in tandem with the datasets in A). 3. Additional related data collected that was not included in the current data package: None 4. Are there multiple versions of the dataset? No A. If yes, name of file(s) that was updated: NA i. Why was the file updated? NA ii. When was the file updated? NA ######################################################################### DATA-SPECIFIC INFORMATION FOR: A) Oryx.Raw.Body\_Heading.Datasets.csv 1. Number of variables: 6 2. Number of cases/rows: 4413065 3. Variable List: * C\_timestamp: The date and time of the time-synchronised body and head data (format: YYYY-mm-dd H:M:OS) * C\_VeDBA.smoothed: VeDBA (g) derived from collar data (post-smoothed by 2 s) * C\_Mag.heading.smoothed: Heading (0-360 degrees) derived from collar data (post-smoothed (circular mean) by 1 s) * H\_VeDBA.smoothed: VeDBA (g) derived from head data (post-smoothed by 2 s) * H\_Mag.heading.smoothed: Heading (0-360 degrees) derived from head data (post-smoothed (circular mean) by 1 s) * ID: Identification number (1-6) dsicerning which data belongs to which Oryx ID. 4. Missing data codes: None 5. Specialized formats or other abbreviations used: None #########################################################################