Which Random Walk is Faster? Methods to Compare Different Step Length Distributions in Individual Animal Movement

Department of Mathematics, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK

^* Corresponding author. E-mail: jdc39@le.ac.uk

Abstract

Good understanding of individual animal movement is needed in the context of epidemiology in order to predict the rate of spread of infectious diseases. It is also required for problems arising in nature conservation, biological invasion, pest monitoring, etc. A question that often appears in the centre of the movement studies is which movement pattern is `faster' or more efficient. For instance, it is widely believed that the pattern quantified by a power law distribution of movement steps is faster than the Brownian motion. Here we show that the answer to this question may be not so straightforward and depends on the way how different step length distributions are compared.