Bayesian estimation of predator diet composition from fatty acids and stable isotopes
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Aquaculture, Fisheries and Fish Science, Bioinformatics, Conservation Biology, Ecology
- Keywords
- Stable isotope analysis, quantitative fatty acid analysis, Bayesian mixing model, QFASA, fatty acid signature, diet analysis, dietary marker
- Copyright
- © 2014 Neubauer et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Bayesian estimation of predator diet composition from fatty acids and stable isotopes. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e413v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.413v2
Abstract
Quantitative analysis of stable isotopes (SI) and, more recently, fatty acid profiles (FAP) are useful and complementary tools for estimating the relative contribution of different prey items in the diet of a predator. The combination of these two approaches, however, has thus far been limited and qualitative. We propose a mixing model for FAP that follows the Bayesian machinery employed in state-of-the-art mixing models for SI. This framework provides both point estimates and probability distributions for individual and population level diet proportions. Where fat content and conversion coefficients are available, they can be used to improve diet estimates. This model can be explicitly integrated with analogous models for SI to increase resolution and clarify predator-prey relationships. We apply our model to simulated data and an experimental dataset that allows us to illustrate modeling strategies and demonstrate model performance. Our methods are provided as an open source software package for the statistical computing environment R.
Author Comment
Small typo and changing the acronym for fatty acid profiles from FAP to FA for fatty acids.