Space & Home Range

Question 1

What is habitat?

Answer 1

Question 2

Describe the instinctive vs. learned components of habitat selection

Answer 2

Closed behaviors are “hardwired” by genetics and less likely to change in response to environment.

Induction refers to dispersing juveniles of some species that seek out a new home range that mimics their natal home range

Question 3

What is a home range and what factors influence it for any given species?

Answer 3

Question 4

Describe the scale of home range selection

Answer 4

Wildlife managers typically work at the 3rd and 4th scales

Question 5

How do interspecific and intraspecific interactions affect home range selection?

Answer 5

Wildlife managers typically work at the 3rd and 4th scales

Question 6

What is territory, and what is its primary determinant?

Answer 6

Question 7

What are core areas?

Answer 7

Areas within a home range where an individual feels secure and spends the majority of its time

In a drawing, this would be inside the home range, and territory would be contained inside the core area.

Question 8

How do we calculate home ranges and how are these techniques changing?

Answer 8

Sight/resight data, telemetry, capture/recapture grids, or other ways to identify where an animal is over time.

Traditionally calculated using Minimum Convex Polygon, Fixed Kernals (KDE, Utilization Distribution)
Movement towards combining or refining these methods due to advances in technology

Home ranges tell you some information, but it has limited prediction power. Resource Selection Functions allow more ability to predict space use. RSF assess which habitat characteristics are important to a species and use those to predict where that species or individuals are likely to be found.

Question 9

How do we figure out migration corridors?

Answer 9

Banding

Sightings

Weather data (weather radars can actually see migrating bird flocks)

Lightweight gps locators