Use of GIS for a spatial and temporal analysis of Kenyan wildlife with generalised linear modelling

This paper applies generalised linear statistical techniques in a GIS to analyse wildlife data from a Kenyan wildlife reserve and its surrounding areas. Attention focuses on the spatial distribution of elephant during nine successive surveys, analysing their temporal and spatial relationship to 12 environmental covariates. A principal component analysis identifies five major determining factors, thereby reducing dimensionality in the data, while a simple spatial analysis procedure, suitable for wildlife data obtained from airborne surveys, quantfies clustering for different animal species. The number of explanatory variables appearing in abundance models is found to be subject to large variations during successive surveys with a minimum and maximum of four and eight variables, respectively. Species from highly clustered populations are found to have over 20 times more observations within short distances compared to the rest. The study concludes that a combination of generalised linear modelling and GIS gives deeper insight into the dynamics of wildlife species in and around well-defined nature reserves.