Benford’s Law for Telemetry Data of Wildlife

Lasse Pröger, Paul Griesberger, Klaus Hackländer, Norbert Brunner and Manfred Kühleitner
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Lasse Pröger: Department of Integrative Biology and Biodiversity Research, Institute of Wildlife Biology and Game Management, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU), 1180 Vienna, Austria
Paul Griesberger: Department of Integrative Biology and Biodiversity Research, Institute of Wildlife Biology and Game Management, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU), 1180 Vienna, Austria
Klaus Hackländer: Department of Integrative Biology and Biodiversity Research, Institute of Wildlife Biology and Game Management, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU), 1180 Vienna, Austria
Norbert Brunner: Department of Integrative Biology and Biodiversity Research, Institute of Mathematics, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU), 1180 Vienna, Austria
Manfred Kühleitner: Department of Integrative Biology and Biodiversity Research, Institute of Mathematics, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU), 1180 Vienna, Austria

Stats, 2021, vol. 4, issue 4, 1-7

Abstract: Benford’s law ( BL ) specifies the expected digit distributions of data in social sciences, such as demographic or financial data. We focused on the first-digit distribution and hypothesized that it would apply to data on locations of animals freely moving in a natural habitat. We believe that animal movement in natural habitats may differ with respect to BL from movement in more restricted areas (e.g., game preserve). To verify the BL -hypothesis for natural habitats, during 2015–2018, we collected telemetry data of twenty individuals of wild red deer from an alpine region of Austria. For each animal, we recorded the distances between successive position records. Collecting these data for each animal in weekly logbooks resulted in 1132 samples of size 65 on average. The weekly logbook data displayed a BL -like distribution of the leading digits. However, the data did not follow BL perfectly; for 9% (99) of the 1132 weekly logbooks, the chi-square test refuted the BL -hypothesis. A Monte Carlo simulation confirmed that this deviation from BL could not be explained by spurious tests, where a deviation from BL occurred by chance.

Keywords: Benford’s law ( BL ); logbook; habitat use; Monte Carlo simulation; red deer ( Cervus elaphus ); telemetry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 C10 C11 C14 C15 C16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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