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Animal interactions are a crucial aspect of behavioral ecology that affect mating, territorial behavior, resource use, and disease spread. Commonly, animals will interact because of shared resources. Recent methods have used time geography to map landscape areas where interactions were possible. However, such methods do not identify areas of less direct interaction, like through smell or sight. These indirect or asynchronous interactions are also a crucial aspect of animal behavioral ecology and affect group behaviors such as leading/following hierarchies and joint resource use. Asynchronous interactions are difficult to map because they can occur in a synchronous space at asynchronous times, as well as in asynchronous spaces at a synchronous time. Here, we present a method termed the temporally asynchronous‐joint potential path area (ta‐jPPA) that maps areas of potential temporally asynchronous–spatially synchronous interactions. We used simulated data to statistically test ta‐jPPA and empirical data to demonstrate how ta‐jPPA can find patterns in habitat use.

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Cost Surfaces are a quantitative means of assigning social, environmental, and engineering costs that impact movement across landscapes. Cost surfaces are a crucial aspect of route optimization and least cost path (LCP) calculations and are used in a wide range of disciplines including computer science, landscape ecology, and energy infrastructure modeling. Linear features present a key weakness to traditional routing calculations along costs surfaces because they cannot identify whether moving from a cell to its adjacent neighbors constitutes crossing a linear barrier (increased cost) or following a corridor (reduced cost). Following and avoiding linear features can drastically change predicted routes. In this paper, we introduce an approach to address this adjacency issue using a search kernel that identifies these critical barriers and corridors. We have built this approach into a new Java-based open-source software package-CostMAP (cost surface multilayer aggregation program)-which calculates cost surfaces and cost networks using the search kernel. CostMAP not only includes the new "adjacency" capability, it is also a versatile multi-platform package that allows users to input multiple GIS data layers and to set weights and rules for developing a weighted-cost network. We compare CostMAP performance with traditional cost surface approaches and show significant performance gains-both following corridors and avoiding barriers-using examples in a movement ecology framework and pipeline routing for carbon capture, and storage (CCS). We also demonstrate that the new software can straightforwardly calculate cost surfaces on a national scale.

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