@conference {JRN54463,
	title = {Spatial and temporal free-ranging cow behaviour pre and post-weaning},
	booktitle = {4th Grazing Livestock Nutrition Conference},
	year = {2010},
	month = {07/2010},
	address = {Estes Park, CO},
	abstract = {<p>Global positioning system (GPS) technology can be used to study free-ranging cow behaviors. GPS equipment was deployed on each of ten cows ranging in age from 3 to 15 years in order to compare and contrast mean {\textpm} standard errors for pre- and post-weaning travel (m.time-1) in two similar (<= 433 ha) arid rangeland paddocks.\&nbsp; Data were collected at a rate of one position fix per second between 12 March and 8 April 2009 for a total of 8.7 million raw GPS fixes across both paddocks.\&nbsp; In addition, all 10 instrumented cows, 5 per paddock, were observed for a total of 32 h across 13 d and their behaviors were recorded on a minute by minute basis during daylight.\&nbsp; The observational data were used to classify rate of travel (m.min-1) into walking, foraging and stationary behaviors. The observed behavioral data were merged with the GPS data.\&nbsp; Next the merged data were examined to classify the GPS data by path speed (m.s-1).\&nbsp; Intervals of 30 s, 60 s, 120 s and 180 s were evaluated to determine the optimum path speed sampling period to discriminate among walking, foraging and stationary behavior.\&nbsp; The path speed associated with {\textquotedblleft}stationary{\textquotedblright} was due to the inherent variability within the uncorrected GPS data used in this study.\&nbsp; Regardless of interval chosen, three distinct peaks were observed.\&nbsp; Within the ranges evaluated, longer sampling intervals (180 s) appeared to show better peak definition, especially for those peaks associated with foraging (0.10 m.s-1) and {\textquotedblleft}stationary{\textquotedblright} (0.03 m.s-1) behaviors.\&nbsp; Shorter sampling periods (30 s) produced smother curves having less distinct peaks, probably as a result of more samples.\&nbsp; The fastest movement had a peak at 1.00 m.s-1 and corresponded to periods when the cows were observed to be traveling between points on the landscape. A 1.00 m.s-1 rate of travel is roughly 2.2 miles per hour, a speed used to manually gather these cows.\&nbsp; Subsequent analyses were performed using 60 s sampling intervals as a compromise for well defined peaks and troughs, smoothness of the curve, and relatively high frequency counts at the high speed end of the distribution. Overall, mean cow travel increased post-weaning over 5 d in Paddock 10B from 1,428 {\textpm} 92.6 m.d-1 to 1,955 {\textpm} 143.4 m.d-1 and over 8 d post-weaning in Paddock 14A from 1,166 {\textpm} 105.8 m.d-1\&nbsp; to 1,509 {\textpm} 92.0 m.d-1. Mean travel in the two paddocks during foraging both pre- and post-weaning varied within a day but not in an identical manner even though the two paddocks were similar in size and topography.\&nbsp; Among four 6 h time intervals foraging travel decreased following weaning between 0600 h (6 am) and noon and between 1800 h (6 pm) and midnight in both paddocks while travel associated with foraging increased between noon and 1800 h (6 pm) in both paddocks.\&nbsp; Foraging travel between midnight and 0600 h (6 am) decreased in Paddock 10B following weaning (64 {\textpm} 5.6 m.6h-1 vs 42 {\textpm} 4.4 m.6h-1) but increased in Paddock 14A (24 {\textpm} 6.6 m.6h-1 vs 60 {\textpm} 7.3 m.6h-1) during this same time interval following weaning.\&nbsp; Differences in foraging travel between midnight and 0600 h (6 am) in the two paddocks may have resulted from several factors including: the number of non-instrumented cows being different in the two paddocks, different weaning dates 13 d apart, and a different spatial distribution of cows within each paddock.\&nbsp; Furthermore, GPS data were lost possibly due to battery failure.\&nbsp; Only one 24 h period of data were lost from one cow in Paddock 10B (post-weaning) compared to loss of GPS data from two and three of the five cows for 24 h pre- and post-weaning, respectively, in Paddock 14A.\&nbsp; Further data analysis evaluating tortuosity of travel (a metric that relates path speed or the summation of distances between each of 60 positions within a minute to displacement speed the distance between only the first position and the 60th position within a minute) appears promising to further characterize free-ranging cow travel. pg 192.<br />
	.</p>
},
	author = {D.M. Anderson and Craig Winters and Marek Doniec and Detweiler, C. and D. Rus and B. Nolen}
}
