  Advances in satellite imaging and GPS tracking devices have given rise to a
new era of remote sensing and geospatial analysis. In environmental science and
conservation ecology, biotelemetric data is often high-dimensional, spatially
and/or temporally, and functional in nature, meaning that there is an
underlying continuity to the biological process of interest. GPS-tracking of
animal movement is commonly characterized by irregular time-recording of animal
position, and the movement relationships between animals are prone to sudden
change. In this paper, I propose a measure of localized mutual information
(LMI) to derive a correlation function for monitoring changes in the pairwise
association between animal movement trajectories. The properties of the LMI
measure are assessed analytically and by simulation under a variety of
circumstances. Advantages and disadvantages of the LMI measure are assessed and
an alternate measure of LMI is proposed to handle potential disadvantages. The
measure of LMI is shown to be an effective tool for detecting shifts in the
correlation of animal movements, and seasonal/phasal correlatory structure.
