# Mapping behavioral landscapes for animal movement: a finite mixture modeling approach

> How does a bobcat move when it meets a city? GPS data from three bobcats in southern California showed that, as urban land increased, they turned away from it or travelled along its edge. Mapping these choices produced a “behavioural landscape” showing which corridors a bobcat is likely to use.

Summary by Kersey Lawrence, Original Wisdom. Updated 7 November 2026. Page: https://www.originalwisdom.com/tracking-literature/2013-tracey-zhu-bobcat-behavioral-landscapes/

## Citation and access

- **Authors:** Jeff A. Tracey, Jun Zhu, Erin Boydston, Lisa Lyren, Robert N. Fisher, Kevin R. Crooks
- **Year published:** 2013
- **Journal or source:** Ecological Applications 23(3): 654–669
- **Full citation:** Tracey, J.A., Zhu, J., Boydston, E., Lyren, L., Fisher, R.N., and Crooks, K.R. 2013. Mapping behavioral landscapes for animal movement: a finite mixture modeling approach. Ecological Applications 23(3): 654–669.
- **DOI:** 10.1890/12-0687.1
- **Access status:** Publisher link only
- **Where to find it:** https://doi.org/10.1890/12-0687.1

## Tags

- **Species:** Mammals > Bobcat
- **Region:** North America > United States
- **Behaviour and ecology:** Behaviour; Connectivity; Dispersal; Human disturbance; Movement; Wildlife corridors
- **Methods and technology:** Akaike Information Criterion (AIC); Finite mixture models; Geographic Information System (GIS); Global Positioning System (GPS) collars
- **Data type:** Existing data; Modelling or theoretical
- **Discipline:** Behaviour and ecology
- **Year published:** 2013

## Detailed keywords

- **Species:** Studied: bobcat (Lynx rufus), three GPS-collared individuals (LYRU1 resident male, LYRU2 resident female, LYRU3 wide-ranging male), selected from 16 collared bobcats. Mentioned from other studies: Willow Flycatcher (Empidonax traillii adastus).
- **Location and habitat:** Orange County, coastal southern California, United States; a 5,971-km² urban land cover raster covering Orange County and parts of Los Angeles County. A biodiversity hotspot with rapid urbanization.
- **Topics:** animal movement in response to landscape features; urbanization and habitat fragmentation; avoidance of urban edges; movement parallel to the urban edge; behavioural states inferred from movement; behavioural landscapes; functional connectivity and wildlife corridors; resident versus dispersal-like movement; male and female differences in response to urban areas
- **Statistics or models:** Finite mixture models of move angles (mixtures of von Mises distributions, with mixing proportions as multiple logit functions of urban cover within 200 m), in the spirit of hierarchical mixture of experts models; particle swarm optimization followed by an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for maximum-likelihood estimates; standard errors from the Hessian matrix; Rayleigh tests for uniformity of turn angles; 11 candidate models compared with small-sample Akaike Information Criterion (AICc), ΔAICc and Akaike weights; Monte Carlo quantiles (20,000 samples); 95% fixed kernel areas of use.
- **Data type:** Existing data: GPS telemetry from an earlier bobcat study (Lyren et al. 2006), locations every 15 or 30 minutes between 22:00 and 01:00 several nights a week, January to July or January to March 2003; plus urban land cover from the National Land Cover Database and the Southern California Association of Governments. Modelling: new statistical models. Inconsistency in the paper: the methods say the model statistics were computed “for each model from A to J”, while 11 models (A to K) were fitted and all 11 are reported in Table 3.

## Synopsis

### 1. What they did

Urban growth is a major threat to carnivores such as bobcats, and conservation planners need to know how animals move around urban areas. The authors developed a new statistical method, a finite mixture model, that sorts an animal’s movement steps into different behavioural responses to a landscape feature, and links the chance of each response to the surroundings.

They applied it to GPS data from three bobcats in Orange County, California, recorded at night every 15 minutes, testing how the bobcats’ direction of travel related to the amount and direction of urban land within 200 m. They compared 11 models for each bobcat, then mapped the most likely behaviour across the landscape to create a “behavioural landscape”.

### 2. What they found

- All three bobcats avoided urban areas more strongly as urban cover around them increased, either by moving away from it or by moving parallel to the urban edge.
- The resident male moved roughly at random where there was little development, then shifted to moving parallel to the edge or towards development, and finally away from urban areas as urban cover rose.
- The resident female moved parallel to the urban edge even at low levels of urban cover, then away from urban areas at higher levels, suggesting she avoided urbanization more than the male.
- The wide-ranging male, whose area of use was about ten times larger and whose movements looked like dispersal, avoided urban areas only by moving parallel to the edge, starting abruptly when urban cover reached 8%. He was never recorded where urban cover exceeded 14%.
- The resident bobcats switched to moving away from development when urban cover within 200 m reached about 20% to 30%.
- Mapping these responses showed areas a bobcat would likely avoid, areas where moving along the urban edge could actually channel a bobcat through a corridor, and areas with no response to development.

### 3. What they concluded

Finite mixture models can classify movement into behavioural states when the behaviour cannot be observed directly, and the resulting behavioural landscapes can show which corridors are likely to be passable for an animal. The approach can include other landscape features and could guide conservation planning for connectivity. Because the bobcats were tracked only late at night, their responses may be the weakest; time of day, internal state and other features deserve study.

### 7. Implications for conservation (from the paper)

- Behavioural landscape maps can help identify corridors that are likely or unlikely to be used, prioritize conservation work, and predict connectivity under future land use.

## Cite this summary

Lawrence, K. 2026. Summary of: Mapping behavioral landscapes for animal movement: a finite mixture modeling approach (Tracey and Zhu et al., 2013). Original Wisdom, Tracking Literature. https://www.originalwisdom.com/tracking-literature/2013-tracey-zhu-bobcat-behavioral-landscapes/