Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM)

Estimation of the parameters was done separately for the animals tracked during different seasons in Kununurra area, while for the animals tracked in Keep River National park, only parameters for the wet season were estimated. The reason for that is that GPS data was collected for only two individuals during the dry season, and they could not be a valid representative for the whole population. Movement parameters (eccentricity, number of separate visits, duration of visit and area) that describe a movement pattern of northern blue tongues were determined with T-LoCoH package in R, as previously explained. Developed Bayesian Hierarchical Model was then used to assess the effect of temperature on peak activity of lizards. Temperature was used as an explanatory variable, while calculated movement parameters were used as response variables. Log-values of response variables were used, since the likelihood function was also represented on a log-scale. The code was run for 100 000 times. When estimation was done, 95% credible intervals were calculated for the population parameters of mean and width using mode and 2.5% and 97.5% quantiles. The results were plotted and 95% credible intervals compared between different seasons and populations.