Network Analysis Movement Model of Gulf Sturgeon Winter Dispersal

Gulf sturgeon emigrate from rivers in late fall and feed in the Gulf of Mexico.  Both manual and automated sonic telemetry have been used to determine the wintertime range, but there has been no analysis of dispersal parameters.  Using data from several arrays of fixed acoustic receivers, treating receivers  as nodes in a network, we use network analysis to describe spatial and temporal dispersion.  We then compare Gulf sturgeon winter feeding movements to random walk movement models, and fit a biased random walk model that incorporates local areas of attraction.