Tag Archives: bottlenose dolphin

Exercise 2: Possible Influence of ENSO Index on Dolphin Sighting Latitudes

Exercise 2

Question Asked: Are latitudinal differences in dolphin sightings in the San Diego, CA survey area related to El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) index values on a monthly temporal scale?

  1. My previous question for Exercise 1 was: do the number of dolphin sightings in the San Diego, CA survey region differ latitudinally? I was finally able to answer this question with a histogram of sighting count by latitudinal difference. I defined latitudinal difference as the difference from the highest latitude of dolphin sightings (the Northernmost sighting point along the San Diego transect line) to the other sighting points, in decimal degrees. Therefore it becomes a simple mathematical subtraction in ArcMap. Smaller differences would be the result of a small difference and therefore mean more Northerly sighting, with large differences being from more Southerly areas. I used all sightings in the San Diego region (from 1981 through 2015). As you can see from below, there is an unequal distribution of sightings at different latitudes. Because I had visual confirmation of differences at least when all sightings are binned (in terms of all years from 1981-2015 treated the same), I looked for what process could be affecting these differences in latitude.

    Comparing the Latitudes with the frequency of dolphin sightings in San Diego, CA

ENSO is a large-scale climate phenomena where the climate modes periodically fluctuate (Sprogis et al. 2018). The climate variability produced by ENSO affects physical oceanic and coastal conditions that can both directly and indirectly influence ecological and biological processes. ENSO can alter food webs because climate changes may impact animal physiology, specifically metabolism. This creates further trophic impacts on predator-prey dynamics, often because of prey availability (Barber and Chavez 1983). During the surveys of bottlenose dolphins in California, multiple ENSO cycles have caused widespread changes in the California Current Ecosystem (CCE), such as the squid fishery collapse (Nezlin, Hamner, and Zeidberg 2002). With this knowledge, I wanted to see if the frequency of dolphin sightings in different latitudes of the most-consistently studied area was driven by ENSO.

Tool/Approach:

Primarily R Studio, some ArcMap 10.6 and Excel

Step by Step:

  1. 1.For this portion of the analysis, I exported my table of latitudinal differences within my attribute table for dolphin sightings from ArcMap 10.6. I saved this as a .csv and imported it into R Studio.
  2. Some of the sighting data needed to be changed because R didn’t recognize the dates as dates, rather as factors. This is important in order to join ENSO data by month and year.
  3. Meanwhile, I found NOAA data on a publicly-sourced website that had months as the columns and years as the rows for a matching ENSO index value of either: 1, 0, or -1 for each month/year combination. A value of 1 is a positive (warm) year, a value of 0 is a neutral year, and a value of -1 is a negative (cold) year. This is a broad-value, because indices range from 1 to -1. But, to simplify my question this was the most logical first step.
  4. I had to convert the NOAA data into two-column data with the date in one column by MM/YYYY and then the Index value in the other column. After multiple attempts in R studio, I hand-corrected them in Excel. Then, imported this data into R studio.
  5. I was then able to tell R to match the sighting date’s month and year to the ENSO data’s month and year, and assign the respective ENSO value. Then I assigned the ENSO values as factors.
  6. I created a boxplot to visualize if there were differences in distributions of latitudinal differences and ENSO index. (See figure)Illustrating the number of sightings grouped by ENSO index values (1, 0, and -1).
  7. Then I ran an ANOVA to see if there was a reportable, strong difference in sighting latitudinal difference and ENSO index value.

    Results:

     

    From the boxplot, it appears that in warm years (ENSO index level of “1”), the dolphins are sighted more frequently in lower latitudes, closer to Mexican waters when compared to the neutral (“0”) and cold years (“-1”). This result is intriguing because I would have expected dolphins to move northerly during warm months to maintain similar body temperatures in the same water temperatures. However, warm ENSO years could shift prey availability or nutrients southerly, which is why there are more sightings further south.  The result of the ANOVA, was a p-value of <2e-16, providing very strong evidence to reject the null of hypothesis of no difference. I followed up with a Tukey HSD and found that there is strong evidence for differences between both the 0 and -1, -1 and 1, and 1 and 0 values. Therefore, the different ENSO indices on a monthly scale are significantly contributing to the differences in sighting latitudes in the San Diego study area.

Tukey HSD output:

diff               lwr                        upr           p adj

0–1 0.01161047 0.004250827 0.01897011 0.0006422

1–1 0.04101170 0.030844193 0.05117920 0.0000000

1-0 02940123 0.020689737 0.03811272 0.0000000

 Critique of the Method(s):

These methods worked very well for visualization and finally solidifying that there was a difference on sighting latitude related to ENSO index value on a broad level. Data transformation and clean-up was challenging in R, and took much longer than I’d expected.

 

References:

Barber, Richard T., and Francisco P. Chavez. 1983. “Biological Consequences of El Niño.” Science 222 (4629): 1203–10.

Sprogis, Kate R., Fredrik Christiansen, Moritz Wandres, and Lars Bejder. 2018. “El Niño Southern Oscillation Influences the Abundance and Movements of a Marine Top Predator in Coastal Waters.” Global Change Biology 24 (3): 1085–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13892.

Contact information: this post was written by Alexa Kownacki, Wildlife Science Ph.D. Student at Oregon State University. Twitter: @lexaKownacki

Exercise 1: Preparing for Point Pattern Analysis

Exercise 1

The Question in Context

In order to answer my question: are the dolphin sighting data points clustered along the transect surveys or do they have an equal distribution pattern? I need to use point pattern analysis. I am trying visualize where in space dolphins were sighted along the coast of California, specifically from my San Diego sighting area. In this exercise, the variable of interest is dolphin sightings. These are x,y coordinates (point data) indicating the presence of common bottlenose dolphins along a transect. However, these transect data were not recorded and I needed to recreate these lines to my best abilities. This process is more challenging than anticipated, but will prove useful in the short-term view of this class and project and long-term in management ramifications.

The Tools

As part of this exercise, I used ArcMap 10.6, GoogleEarth, qGIS, and Excel. Although I was only intending on importing my Excel data, saved as a .csv file into ArcMap, that was not working, so other tools were necessary. The final goal of this exercise was to complete point-pattern analyses comparing distance along recreated transects to sightings. From there, the sightings would be broken down by year, season, or environmental factor (El Niño versus La Niña years) to look for distributing patterns, specifically if the points were ever clustered or equally distributed at different points in time.

Steps/Outputs/Review of Methods and Analysis

My first step was to clean up my sightings data enough that it could be exported as a .csv and imported as x-y data into ArcMap. However, ArcMap, no matter the transformation equation, seemed to understand the projected or geographic coordinate systems. After many attempts, where my data ended up along the east coast of Africa or in the Gulf of Mexico, I tried a work around; I imported the .csv file into qGIS with the help of a classmate, and then exported that file as a shape file. Then, I was able to import that shape file into ArcMap and select the correct geographic and projected coordinate systems. The points finally appeared off the coast of California.

I then found a shape file of North America with a more accurate coastline, to add to the base map. This step will be important later when I add in track lines, and how the distributions of points along these track lines are related to bathymetry. The bathymetric lines will need to be rasterized and later interpolated.

The next step was the track line recreation. I chose to focus on the San Diego study site. This site has the most data and the most consistently and standardly collected data. The surveys always left the same port of Mission Bay, San Diego, CA traveled north at 5-10km/hr to a specific beach (landmark), then turned around. It is noted on sighting data whether the track line was surveyed on both directions (South to North and North to South), or unidirectional (South to North). Because some data were collected prior to the invention of a GPS and the commercial availability, I have to recreate these track lines. I started trying to use ArcMap to draw the lines but had difficulty. Luckily, after many attempts, it was suggested that I use Google Earth. Here I found a tool to create a survey line where I can mark the edges along the coastline at an approximate distance from shore, and then export that file. It took a while to realize that the file needed to be exported as a .kml and not a .kmz.

Once exported as a .kml, I was able to convert the .kml file to a layer file and then to a shape file in ArcMap. The next step in this is somehow getting all points within one kilometer of the track line (my spatial scale for this part of the project) to associate with that track line. One idea was snapping the points to the line. However, this did not work. I am still stuck here: the major step before I can have my point data with an association to the line and then begin a point pattern analysis in ArcMap and/or R Studio.

Results

Although I do not currently have results of this exercise, fully. I can say for certain, that it has not been without trying, nor am I stopping. I have been brainstorming and milking resources from classmates and teaching assistants about how to associate the sighting data points with the track line to then do this cluster analysis. Hopefully, based on this can be exported to R studio where I can see distributions along the transect. I may be able to do a density-based analysis which would show if different sections along the transect, which I would need to designate and potentially rasterize first, have different densities of points. I would expect the sections to differ seasonally.

Critiques

Although I add in my opinions on usefulness and ease above, I do believe this will be very helpful in analyzing distribution patterns. Right now, it is largely unknown if there are differences in distribution patterns for this population because they move rapidly and at great distances. But, by investigating data from only the San Diego site, I can determine if there are differences in distributions along the transects temporally and spatially. In addition, the total counts of sightings in each location per unit effort will be useful to see the influx to that entire survey area over time.

Contact information: this post was written by Alexa Kownacki, Wildlife Science Ph.D. Student at Oregon State University. Twitter: @lexaKownacki