Cows appear attracted to burned areas
Preliminary analysis of GPS collar data from Bob PBG pastures
Devan Allen McGranahan
- GPS dataloggers were attached to three animals/pasture for the first month of grazing
- Recovery is a process: While the rest of the loggers will come in next week, we recovered all loggers from the Bob unit Wednesday 20 June.
- One logger was lost and one logger failed.
- Remaining 10 loggers recorded positions at 10-second intervals for 5 minutes, followed by a 50-min sleep period. Total of 395,749 usable GPS locations.
- Quick-and-dirty spatial analysis (interpolated relative frequency of recorded positions within 50 x 50 m grid) suggests higher density of positions logged in patches burned in Spring 2018 (as well as central water area).
Distribution of cattle locations within the four pastures at the Bob PBG location (log scale). Dotted lines denote perimeters of spring 2018 burns. Spatial analysis consists of spline interpolation (R package akima) on (log-transformed) counts of GPS positions within 50 sq. m. grids created by rounding UTM coordinates to nearest 50 m.