“HerdGPS-Preprocessor”—A Tool to Preprocess Herd Animal GPS Data; Applied to Evaluate Contact Structures in Loose-Housing Horses

Abstract

Sensors delivering information on the position of farm animals have been widely used in precision livestock farming. Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors are already known from applications in military, private and commercial environments, and their application in animal science is increasing. However, as trade-offs between sensor cost, battery life and sensor weight have to be made, GPS based studies scheduling long data collection periods and including a high number of animals, have to deal with problems like high hardware costs and data disruption during recharging of sensors. Furthermore, human–animal interaction due to sensor changing at the end of battery life interferes with the animal behaviour under analysis. The present study thus proposes a setting to deal with these challenges and offers the software tool “HerdGPS-Preprocessor”, because collecting position data from multiple animals nonstop for several weeks produces a high amount of raw data which needs to be sorted, preprocessed and provided in a suitable format per animal and day. The software tool “HerdGPS-Preprocessor” additionally outputs contact lists to enable a straight analysis of animal contacts. The software tool was exemplarily deployed for one month of daily and continuous GPS data of 40 horses in a loose-housing boarding facility in northern Germany. Contact lists were used to generate separate networks for every hour, which are then analysed with regard to the network parameter density, diameter and clique structure. Differences depending on the day and the day time could be observed. More dense networks with more and larger cliques were determined in the hours prior to the opening of additional pasture.

Equine Social Behaviour: Love, War and Tolerance

“…These quantitative criteria are primarily based on the reported interindividual distance of 2 m to two horse lengths, within which horses only tolerate close affiliates [12,13,27,38,39,54,[115][116][117] and include measurements of spatial proximity between two horses, the number and duration of affiliative or agonistic interactions per hour and recording the nearest neighbour. In addition, recent studies have incorporated social network analysis to examine indirect connections beyond the dyad level and analyse the patterns of individual and group-level social interactions [41,52,[118][119][120][121].…”

Area and Resource Utilization of Group-Housed Horses in an Active Stable

“…A grid of squares with a size of 3 × 3 m for the whole paddock and pasture area was generated and all recordings outside the paddock and pasture borders were deleted. As a result, the position of each horse in a 3 × 3 m square was determined every 10 s. Further filtering details can be found in Salau et al [20]. In other previous investigations of horses' contacts, an Euclidean distance of 3 m between horses (based on data loggers attached to collars on horses' necks) had been deemed the most useful spatial contact definition [21].…”