Resource use by marten at fine spatial extents
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Resource use by marten at fine spatial extents Gary J. Roloff 1
&
Bradford R. Silet 2 & Steven M. Gray 1 & John M. Humphreys 1 & Eric M. Clark 1,2
Received: 28 March 2020 / Accepted: 29 July 2020 / Published online: 10 August 2020 # Mammal Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Białowieża, Poland 2020
Abstract Martens (Martes spp.) occupy areas with complex forest structure that can exhibit patchy distribution, particularly in managed forest landscapes. These structures (e.g., downed wood) are often difficult to reliably sample so more easily acquired surrogates may better describe marten habitat. Recent advances in global positioning system (GPS) collars combined with integrated (i.e., imagery with geospatial modeling), resolute, remotely sensed maps offer a potentially efficient means of understanding marten space use. We placed GPS collars on 13 American marten (M. americana), attempted to acquire a locational fix every 15 min, and calculated adaptive kernel home ranges from successful locations. We modeled probability of marten use as a function of covariates derived from remotely sensed data that included proportion of vegetation cover types, and distances to maintained roads and hydrographic features at 2.5, 4.5, and 7.1 ha extents. Average cover type values varied minimally across spatial extents we evaluated, indicating fine-scale homogenization. Amount of tall (> 10 m) deciduous forest, tall and short conifer forests, and riparian forests had positive effects on marten use, whereas distance to maintained roads had a weak negative effect. Broad riparian areas (e.g., scrub–shrub swamps that occur in broad topographic depressions), not necessarily associated with mapped hydrographic lines, were heavily used by marten. We found that core use areas for marten could reliably be predicted from 30 m remotely sensed maps summarized at relatively small extents (2.4–7.1 ha). Keywords American marten . Forest structure . LANDFIRE . Martes americana . Michigan
Introduction Wildlife use resources hierarchically, with selection patterns at each level of the hierarchy offering different insights into organism ecology (Johnson 1980; Thompson et al. 2012; Montgomery and Roloff 2013). Variations in spatial and temporal extents loosely define levels of the hierarchy, ranging from the geographic range of a species (broad spatial and long temporal extents) to microhabitat (fine spatial and shorter temporal extents; Wiens 1989). Studies on resource selection Communicated by: Andrzej Zalewski Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13364-020-00525-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Gary J. Roloff [email protected] 1
Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
2
Natural Resources Department, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, Sault Ste. Marie, MI 49783, USA
within home ranges (i.e., one level of the hierarchy) are common, offering insights into indi
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