I am attempting to look at nest attendance patterns in birds. I have a dataset looking at 5 nests, every 5 minutes I assessed whether the male=1, female=2, both birds=3 or no birds=4 were at each nest. This was done continuosly for 70 days. An example of the data can be seen in the attached image. What I want to do is assess how nesting effort varies between the male and female in each nest, and graph this as well as statistically analyse it, but I have no idea how.
My hypothesis is that females spend significantly longer periods of time on the nest.
I will be analyzing this in R.
Can anyone help?
Best Answer
I detected your question just now, so probably, it is not up-to-date anymore. There are a lot of tools for (visually) analyzing categorical time series. I could imagine that a rate evolution graph (easily implemented in R) could be helpful to you. I can send you papers and pieces of code if you are still interested in the topic.
http://mathstat.hsu-hh.de/weiss.html