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 4 T-distribution parameter estimates derived from estimated Argos location error distributions for three free-ranging whale species

LC	VMRF02				Sperm				Blue/Fin
LC	Scale	se	df	se	Scale	se	df	se	Scale	se	df	se
Longitude
3	0.29	0.10	3.07	2.80	0.46	0.14	2.00	1.06	0.49	0.08	14.99	32.36
2	0.31	0.07	1.22	0.32	1.41	0.14	13.21	13.18	0.71	0.10	5.28	3.38
1	0.90	0.18	2.30	0.94	2.99	0.12	100.00	178.98	1.01	0.11	3.61	1.24
0	2.16	0.52	0.91	0.21	5.54	0.44	3.53	0.84	1.76	0.29	1.68	0.43
A	0.51	0.10	0.79	0.13	3.70	0.49	2.29	0.61	1.12	0.09	1.77	0.23
B	4.21	0.68	1.08	0.19	5.49	0.52	1.92	0.32	2.91	0.15	1.54	0.11
Latitude
3	0.12	0.04	2.08	1.17	0.37	0.10	2.30	1.27	0.34	0.06	4.52	2.78
2	0.26	0.04	6.32	4.15	0.90	0.11	4.78	2.32	0.39	0.05	3.47	1.31
1	0.46	0.09	3.90	2.61	2.01	0.12	10.00	4.59	0.62	0.07	4.01	1.52
0	1.61	0.32	1.01	0.22	2.65	0.19	4.36	1.13	0.95	0.19	1.83	0.61
A	0.51	0.08	1.06	0.19	3.05	0.36	3.24	1.07	0.76	0.06	2.26	0.37
B	3.04	0.43	1.33	0.25	3.61	0.35	1.67	0.25	1.71	0.09	1.64	0.13

Maximum-likelihood estimates of t-distribution parameters for scale (km) and degrees of freedom (df), with standard errors (se) fit to Argos location error estimates for each location class (LC). Values are presented for VMRF02 (as estimated by [45]) and as obtained in this study for sperm and blue/fin whale datasets

ISSN: 2050-3385