Seasonal and daily shifts in behavior and resource selection: how a carnivore navigates costly landscapes
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BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY –ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Seasonal and daily shifts in behavior and resource selection: how a carnivore navigates costly landscapes E. Hance Ellington1,2 · Erich M. Muntz3 · Stanley D. Gehrt1 Received: 30 March 2020 / Accepted: 8 September 2020 / Published online: 16 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The dynamic environmental conditions in highly seasonal systems likely have a strong influence on how species use the landscape. Animals must balance seasonal and daily changes to landscape risk with the underlying resources provided by that landscape. One way to balance the seasonal and daily changes in the costs and benefits of a landscape is through behaviorally-explicit resource selection and temporal partitioning. Here, we test whether resource selection of coyotes (Canis latrans) in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Nova Scotia, Canada is behaviorally-explicit and responsive to the daily and seasonal variation to presumed costs and benefits of moving on the landscape. We used GPS data and local convex hulls to estimate space use and Hidden Markov Models to estimate three types of movement behavior: encamped, foraging, and traveling. We then used integrated step-selection analysis to investigate behaviorally explicit resource selection across times of day (diurnal, crepuscular, and nocturnal) and season (snow-free and snow). We found that throughout the day and seasonally coyotes shifted foraging behavior and altered behavior and resource choices to avoid moving across what we could be a challenging landscape. These changes in behavior suggest that coyotes have a complex response to land cover, terrain, and linear corridors that are not only scale dependent but also vary by behavior, diel period, and season. By examining the resource selection across three axes (behavior, time of day, and season), we have a more nuanced understanding of how a predator balances the cost and benefits of a stochastic environment. Keywords Cape Breton Highlands National Park · Coyote (Canis latrans) · Home range · Movement · Season · Snow
Introduction
Communicated by Mathew Samuel Crowther. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04754-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * E. Hance Ellington [email protected] 1
School of Environment and Natural Resources, Ohio State University, 210 Kottman Hall, 2021 Coffey Road, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
2
Present Address: Range Cattle Research and Education Center, Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, 3401 Experiment Station Road, Ona, FL 33865, USA
3
Cape Breton Highlands National Park, PO Box 158, Chéticamp, NS B0E1H0, Canada
Animals use space such that they acquire sufficient resources to meet energetic demands, successfully reproduce, shelter from predation, or harsh environmental conditions, and respond to inter- and intra-specific competition. As such, the structure and composition of the landscape can have a sig
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