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.