Identifying candidate causal relationships in fish movement patterns

Although there has been considerable research on the analysis of the second order effects of movement (i.e., the analysis of the patterns, similarities, or characteristics of trajectories), Gschwend and Laube (2012) argue that not enough research has addressed the analysis of first-order effects (i.e., the impact of the environmental context in which movement takes place). In this paper we outline ongoing research investigating an important and challenging aspect of context-aware movement analysis: causation. Specifically, the research aims to explore techniques for mining dense spatiotemporal data about movement patterns and environmental changes to assist domain experts in identifying and testing hypotheses about possible causal relations between movement events and environmental events.