Quantitative Primate Behavioral Modeling & Microclimate Analysis
Location: Cape Peninsula, South Africa | Tools: R (v3.6.0+), Longitudinal Observational Analysis, Multivariate Linear Regression, Pearson Pairwise Correlations, Time-Budget Feature Engineering.
Problem & Context: Evaluated whether ambient temperature and rainfall predict social thermoregulation and grooming durations in wild chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) using focal sample observations.
Technical Execution: Standardized temporal markers into continuous decimal metrics in R, integrated historical weather records, and evaluated univariate and multivariate linear regressions across 1,000+ focal records (42,000 total Excel rows analyzed).
Key Finding: Grooming allocations remained stable across ambient climate shifts (p = 0.495), indicating sociality is maintained independently of cold-stress thermoregulation.