Montgomery, R.A., Roloff, G.J., Ver Hoef, J.M. & Millspaugh, J.J. Can We Accurately Characterize Wildlife Resource Use When Telemetry Data Are Imprecise? Journal of Wildlife Management 74, 1917-1925 (2010).

 This study employed GIS to test the 5 most common techniques in wildlife science of correcting for inaccuracies of positional data obtained from telemetry.  This is important because error in positional accuracy can lead to the wrong classifications being made in relation to habitat preferences, home ranges, dispersion patterns and landscape use.  The authors created different covariate rasters to represent different types of landscapes and also different types of predictor variables.  All methods of telemetry correction were simulated with randomly generated points and were tested against both ‘categorical’ rasters, representing a land cover type predictor, and a ‘continuous’ raster representing distance or elevation.  Also, field collected positions of elk in South Dakota were used in the same method to validate the findings.  They found that patch size significantly affects the probability that the telemetry error will skew results of an analysis.  Also, it showed that of all techniques to correct for telemetry inaccuracy, ignoring the inaccuracy is just as good as making corrections.  This paper was a good reminder to account for inaccuracies in positional data collected in the field, and that validation of techniques is something that should be preformed often and incorporate the latest technology.