Research Questions

Published

November 28, 2025

Below are some examples of research questions that could be explored with the dingo GPS data set. These are just suggestions to get you thinking - feel free to come up with your own questions too!

The focus of papers that have previously analysed this data focused on broad-scale behaviours like home ranges (Newsome, Ballard, Dickman, Fleming, and Howden 2013) and landscape-scale resource selection (Newsome, Ballard, Dickman, Fleming, and Ven 2013), but there are a number of other research questions that could be addressed, particularly at fine-scales.

Some suggestions are:

How do dingo behaviours differ between individuals at mine sites and those elsewhere?

  • Do non-mine dingoes spend more time in higher energy foraging states?
  • When do they switch behaviours, how does that differ between mine/non-mine IDs

Methods

What is the influence of the surrounding environment on the dingoes’ movement?

  • Do they select for linear features such as roads?
  • Does their movement and habitat selection differ between mine and non-mine sites?

Methods

How do dingoes’ behaviours change across the day?

  • Are there temporal dynamics in their movement and habitat selection?
  • Does the probability of switching behaviours vary throughout the day?

Methods

How do dingoes connect through the landscape?

  • What are their connectivity pathways and movement corridors?
  • Would adding more roads increase or decrease their landscape connectivity?

Methods

Do dingoes near mines have a higher probability of disease transmission?

  • Do dingoes near mines revisit the same sites more often, such as dumps?
  • Which dingoes interact more often with other individuals?
  • Are dingoes at mine sites have more connected social networks?

Methods

References

Bracis, Chloe, Keith L Bildstein, and Thomas Mueller. 2018. “Revisitation analysis uncovers spatio-temporal patterns in animal movement data.” Ecography 41 (November): 1801–11. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.03618.
Cowan, Mitchell A, Scott W Forrest, Samantha A Setterfield, Judy A Dunlop, Lesley A Gibson, and Dale G Nimmo. 2025. “The impact of mining on animal movement and landscape connectivity revealed through simulations and scenarios.” Ecological Applications 35 (October): e70134. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.70134.
Dorber, Martin, Manuela Panzacchi, Olav Strand, and Bram van Moorter. 2023. “New indicator of habitat functionality reveals high risk of underestimating trade-offs among sustainable development goals: The case of wild reindeer and hydropower.” Ambio 52 (April): 757–68. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-022-01824-x.
Etherington, Thomas R. 2016. “Least-Cost Modelling and Landscape Ecology: Concepts, Applications, and Opportunities.” Current Landscape Ecology Reports 1 (March): 40–53. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40823-016-0006-9.
Forrest, Scott W, Dan Pagendam, Michael Bode, Christopher Drovandi, Jonathan R Potts, Justin Perry, Eric Vanderduys, and Andrew J Hoskins. 2024. “Predicting fine‐scale distributions and emergent spatiotemporal patterns from temporally dynamic step selection simulations.” Ecography, December. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.07421.
Fortin, Daniel, Hawthorne L Beyer, Mark S Boyce, Douglas W Smith, Thierry Duchesne, and Julie S Mao. 2005. “Wolves influence elk movements: Behavior shapes a trophic cascade in Yellowstone National Park.” Ecology 86 (May): 1320–30. https://doi.org/10.1890/04-0953.
Gurarie, Eliezer. 2013. “Behavioral Change Point Analysis in R: The bcpa package.” Behavioural Change Point Analysis in R: The Bcpa Package, 1–16.
Gurarie, Eliezer, Russel D Andrews, and Kristin L Laidre. 2009. “A novel method for identifying behavioural changes in animal movement data.” Ecology Letters 12 (May): 395–408. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01293.x.
Gurarie, Eliezer, Chloe Bracis, Maria Delgado, Trevor D Meckley, Ilpo Kojola, and C Michael Wagner. 2016. “What is the animal doing? Tools for exploring behavioural structure in animal movements.” The Journal of Animal Ecology 85 (January): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.12379.
Hofmann, David D, Gabriele Cozzi, John W McNutt, Arpat Ozgul, and Dominik M Behr. 2023. “A three-step approach for assessing landscape connectivity via simulated dispersal: African wild dog case study.” Landscape Ecology 38 (February): 981–98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-023-01602-4.
Klappstein, Natasha J, Théo Michelot, John Fieberg, Eric J Pedersen, and Joanna Mills Flemming. 2024. “Step selection functions with non‐linear and random effects.” Methods in Ecology and Evolution, June. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210x.14367.
Langrock, Roland, Ruth King, Jason Matthiopoulos, Len Thomas, Daniel Fortin, and Juan M Morales. 2012. “Flexible and practical modeling of animal telemetry data: hidden Markov models and extensions.” Ecology 93 (November): 2336–42. https://doi.org/10.1890/11-2241.1.
McClintock, Brett T, Ruth King, Len Thomas, Jason Matthiopoulos, Bernie J McConnell, and Juan M Morales. 2012. “A general discrete-time modeling framework for animal movement using multistate random walks.” Ecological Monographs 82 (August): 335–49. https://doi.org/10.1890/11-0326.1.
Newsome, Thomas M, Guy-Anthony Ballard, Christopher R Dickman, Peter J S Fleming, and Chris Howden. 2013. “Anthropogenic resource subsidies determine space use by Australian arid zone dingoes: an improved resource selection modelling approach.” PloS One 8 (May): e63931. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0063931.
Newsome, Thomas M, Guy-Anthony Ballard, Christopher R Dickman, Peter J S Fleming, and Remy van de Ven. 2013. “Home range, activity and sociality of a top predator, the dingo: a test of the Resource Dispersion Hypothesis.” Ecography 36 (August): 914–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0587.2013.00056.x.
Signer, J, J Fieberg, B Reineking, U Schlägel, B Smith, N Balkenhol, and T Avgar. 2023. “Simulating animal space use from fitted integrated Step‐Selection Functions (iSSF).” Methods in Ecology and Evolution, December. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210x.14263.
Signer, Johannes, John Fieberg, and Tal Avgar. 2019. “Animal movement tools (amt): R package for managing tracking data and conducting habitat selection analyses.” Ecology and Evolution 9 (January): 880–90. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.4823.
Thurfjell, Henrik, Simone Ciuti, and Mark Boyce. 2014. “Applications of step-selection functions in ecology and conservation.” Movement Ecology 2 (February): 4. https://doi.org/10.1186/2051-3933-2-4.
Van Moorter, Bram, Ilkka Kivimäki, Andreas Noack, Robin Devooght, Manuela Panzacchi, Kimberly R Hall, Pierre Leleux, and Marco Saerens. 2023. “Accelerating advances in landscape connectivity modelling with the ConScape library.” Methods in Ecology and Evolution 14 (January): 133–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210x.13850.