Animal movement dispersion with stochastic partial differential equations: Inference and simulations

Fernando Baltazar-Larios, Francisco Delgado-Vences

Published 2023-01-19Version 1

In this paper, we propose a model for animal movement based on stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). Indeed, we are interested in model animal movement under the influence of external forces given for the environment, therefore we consider a non-isotropic movement without the use of a gradient or preferred movement. We use the Galerkin projection to transform the Eulerian model into a Lagrangian one, which allows us to perform simulations of individual animals. In addition, we study statistical properties for two crucial parameters of the SPDE that describe the dynamical of the system, and we propose a method to estimate them. This will allow us to fit the model to a actual data. We illustrate our results with numerical experiments.