A method to detect inactive periods in animal movement using density-based clustering

•The DBCIP method detects inactive periods of an animal using only a temporally ordered sequence of position recordings.•Tracking data for sheep on an experimental site in Norway, is used as case study.•The paper proposes a statistical method for estimating the positioning error of the recordings.

In this paper, we propose a method to find inactive periods of a trajectory and employ it to livestock tracking.In contrast to the existing methods to find inactive periods in the domain of animal movement studies, the proposed method estimates inactive periods based on the position recordings only, without involving information from activity sensors or field observations. The only parameter that the proposed method requires is the minimum duration of inactivity. Inactivity means being stationary or having limited variation in position. The results have been verified by applying the method to a dataset where activity sensor recordings are also available.