On Higher Ground: How Well Can Dynamic Body Acceleration Determine Speed in Variable Terrain?

INTRODUCTION: Animal travel speed is an ecologically significant parameter, with implications for the study of energetics and animal behaviour. It is also necessary for the calculation of animal paths by dead-reckoning. Dead-reckoning uses heading and speed to calculate an animal’s path through its environment on a fine scale. It is often used in aquatic environments, where transmission telemetry is difficult. However, its adoption for tracking terrestrial animals is limited by our ability to measure speed accurately on a fine scale. Recently, tri-axial accelerometers have shown promise for estimating speed, but their accuracy appears affected by changes in substrate and surface gradients. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate four metrics of acceleration; Overall dynamic body acceleration (ODBA), vectorial dynamic body acceleration (VDBA), acceleration peak frequency and acceleration peak amplitude, as proxies for speed over hard, soft and inclined surfaces, using humans as a model species. RESULTS: A general linear model (GLM) showed a significant difference in the relationships between the metrics and speed depending on substrate or surface gradient. When the data from all surface types were considered together, VeDBA had the highest coefficient of determination. CONCLUSIONS: All of the metrics showed some variation in their relationship with speed according to the surface type. This indicates that changes in the substrate or surface gradient during locomotion by animals would produce errors in speed estimates, and also in dead-reckoned tracks if they were calculated from speeds based entirely on a priori calibrations. However, we describe a method by which the relationship between acceleration metrics and speed can be corrected ad hoc, until tracks accord with periodic ground truthed positions, obtained via a secondary means (e.g. VHF or GPS telemetry). In this way, dead-reckoning provides a means to obtain fine scale movement data for terrestrial animals, without the need for additional data on substrate or gradient.