A new paper in Ecology by Thomas Meyer, professor, and Tracy Rittenhouse, associate professor, in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment (NRE), addresses this problem by providing researchers with two mathematical methods to model animal movement in three dimensions including both topography, such as mountains, but also accounting for Earth’s curvature.

The paper reports that, if an animal moves vertically substantially less than they move horizontally, existing models based on map projects are pretty accurate. However, if an animal moves vertically as much or more than they move horizontally, these calculations have significant errors.

A group of UBC Okanagan students has helped create technology that could improve how doctors and scientists detect everything from tumours to wildfires. 

Working under the guidance of Associate Professor Xiaoping Shi from UBCO’s Department of Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics and Statistics, the students designed and tested a system called an adaptive multiple change point energy-based model segmentation (MEBS).