doi:10.1038/s41598-017-17553-1: Variables extracted from radar tracks

1 x Excel file (.xls)

This file shows all variable extracted from the radar flight tracks which were used in analyses for the publication:

Woodgate JL, Makinson JC, Lim KS, Reynolds AM, Chittka L. Continuous Radar Tracking Illustrates the Development of Multi-destination Routes of Bumblebees. Scientific reports. 2017 Dec 11;7(1):17323. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-17553-1

The file contains one row for each recorded flight. The following variables are included:

BeeID: unique number identifying each individual bee we tracked. Numbers correspond to ‘Bee1’, ‘Bee 2’ etc in the manuscript.

BoutNumber: number identifying how many flights each bee had made. A single bout encompasses all the activity made between the bee leaving the nest and returning again.

TrackingDay: keeps track of whether each track was recorded on the first, second etc day on which the bee was allowed to forage on the feeder array.

StartTime: Date and time at which the bee left the nest for each foraging bout.

PathLengthTotal: cumulative length of a straight-line path between every positional fix over the entire foraging bout.

PathLengthExplorationLegs: each leg of the journey was characterised as an exploration leg, if the bee travelled more than 50m from all previously discovered feeders or within-array if it did not. This is the total distance travelled during exploration legs.

StraightLinePathLength: the straight-line distance joining all the feeders visited in each bout in the order they were visited; this is the shortest distance a bee could travel while maintaining the observed visit sequence.

RatioStraightLineToObservedPathLength: StraightLinePathLength / PathLengthTotal

DurationTotal: the total time elapsed between the bee’s departure from the nest and its return.

SequenceOptimality: referred to as optimality score in the manuscript. A measure of how similar the sequence of feeder visits in each bout was to the visit order that leads to the shortest possible flight path. See methods in the manuscript for further details.

MeanLegStraightness: The straightness of each leg of a track was defined as the distance component of the vector sum of the straight lines connecting every pair of positional fixes within that leg and can range from 0 (datapoints form a circle) to 1 (the path forms a straight line). The straightness of an entire bout was the mean of the straightness score for all legs; a score of 1 would indicate that the route was composed of perfect straight lines between locations, although there may be changes of direction from one leg to the next.

SequenceSelfSimilarity: a measure of how similar the sequence of feeder visits in each bout was to the sequence in the previous bout undertaken by the same bee. See methods in the manuscript for further details.

FlightPathSelfSimilarity: a measure of how similar the actual spatial positions of the bee during each flight were to the previous flight undertaken by the same bee. See methods in the manuscript for further details.

FlightPathMeanLegSelfSimilarity: similar to FlightPathSelfSimilarity, but comparing each leg of the journey to the most recent flight with the same starting and ending locations. See methods in the manuscript for further details.