ABSTRACT
Wildlife monitoring entails animal tracking, by radio and acoustic signals that provide not only location of the animals but also information such as environmental conditions and physiological conditions of the animal. Satellite technology, prominently the Global Positioning System and data satellites, provides extensive and long-term monitoring in remote areas and particularly in the ocean environment. Together with animal tracking, remote sensing helps to monitor terrestrial wildlife habitat, by classifying images in terms of factors that make land suitable as habitat for a particular species. Analyzing the changes on habitat, for example by time series of fragmentation metrics, allows to monitor changes in habitat. This chapter provides a brief introduction to spatial analysis using point patterns and kriging interpolation, since spatial distributions are of importance in many types of wildlife population distribution as well as habitat structure.
