An at-sea assessment of Argos location accuracy for three species of large whales, and the effect of deep-diving behavior on location error

Table 1 Number of Argos and Fastloc GPS locations collected from three free-ranging whale species

Species	Location type	Processing	Total	LC 3	LC 2	LC 1	LC 0	LC A	LC B
Sperm	Argos attached	Pre	4145	192	434	1050	920	493	1056
		Matched	1206	36	134	360	283	127	266
		Edited	3320	210	411	941	652	364	742
	Argos floating	Pre	1673	707	522	207	48	68	121
	Argos floating	Interpolated	1438	631	433	176	43	58	97
	GPS attached	Raw	7169
		Pre	5431
		Matched	1047
	GPS floating	Raw	741
	GPS floating	Pre	653
Blue/Fin	Argos attached	Pre	4335	96	184	274	176	785	2820
		Matched	1712	57	99	131	88	349	988
		Edited	3649	109	183	263	147	656	2291
	Argos floating	Pre	626	229	177	69	19	36	96
	Argos floating	Interpolated	507	204	156	59	17	23	48
	GPS attached	Raw	13,683
		Pre	13,282
		Matched	1652
	GPS floating	Raw	338
	GPS floating	Pre	247

Each row represents the number of locations after the corresponding step of data processing. Location Class = LC; attached is when tag is physically on the whale; floating is when a tag has detached from the whale and is floating freely; Argos pre-processing (pre) is removal of LC Z; GPS pre-processing (pre) is removal of locations derived from fewer than five satellites, with residual value > 30, or speed > 30 km/h; matched is when an Argos location is within 5 min of a Fastloc GPS location; interpolated is an Argos location time stamp used for interpolating a position along the Fastloc GPS track to match with the Argos location; raw are unprocessed Fastloc GPS locations. A total of 23 LC-Z locations were removed during pre-processing (13 attached, 0 floating from sperm whales, 9 attached and 1 floating from blue/fin whales), which are not represented in the table. Numbers presented represent location data from 20 ADB tags deployed on sperm whales, eight ADB tags deployed on blue whales, and five ADB tags deployed on fin whales. Data were collected from sperm whales tracked in the Gulf of Mexico during summer 2011 and 2013, and from blue and fin whales tracked off southern California during late summer 2014 and 2015

ISSN: 2050-3385