Sparse movement data can reveal social influences on individual travel decisions

The monitoring of animal movement patterns provides insights into animals decision-making behaviour. It is generally assumed that high-resolution data are needed to extract meaningful behavioural patterns, which potentially limits the application of this approach. Obtaining high-resolution movement data continues to be an economic and technical challenge, particularly for animals that live in social groups. Here, we test whether accurate movement behaviour can be extracted from data that possesses increasingly lower temporal resolution. To do so, we use a modified version of force matching, in which simulated forces acting on a focal animal are compared to observed movement data. We show that useful information can be extracted from sparse data. We apply this approach to a sparse movement dataset collected on the adult members of a troop of baboons in the DeHoop Nature Reserve, South Africa. We use these data to test the hypothesis that individuals are sensitive to isolation from the group as a whole or, alternatively, whether they are sensitive to the location of specific individuals within the group. Using data from a focal animal, our data provide support for both hypothesis, with stronger support for the latter. Although the focal animal was found to be sensitive to the group, this occurred only on a small number of occasions when the group as a whole was highly clustered as a single entity away from the focal animal. We suggest that specific social interactions may thus drive overall group cohesion. Given that sparse movement data is informative about individual movement behaviour, we suggest that both high (~seconds) and relatively low (~minutes) resolution datasets are valuable for the study of how individuals react to and manipulate their local social and ecological environments.