Habitat suitability does not capture the essence of animal-defined corridors

Scharf, Anne K.; Belant, Jerrold L.; Beyer, Dean E.; Wikelski, Martin; Safi, Kamran

Habitat suitability does not capture the essence of animal-defined corridors

Dateien

Scharf_2-1v9lqz4buoet56.pdfGröße: 2.22 MBDownloads: 303

Datum

2018

Autor:innen

Scharf, Anne K.

Belant, Jerrold L.

Beyer, Dean E.

Wikelski, Martin

Safi, Kamran

Open Access-Veröffentlichung

Open Access Gold

Sammlungen

Biologie

Publikationstyp

Zeitschriftenartikel

Publikationsstatus

Published

Erschienen in

Movement Ecology. 2018, 6, 18. eISSN 2051-3933. Available under: doi: 10.1186/s40462-018-0136-2

Zusammenfassung

Background
Increases in landscape connectivity can improve a species’ ability to cope with habitat fragmentation and degradation. Wildlife corridors increase landscape connectivity and it is therefore important to identify and maintain them. Currently, corridors are mostly identified using methods that rely on generic habitat suitability measures. One important and widely held assumption is that corridors represent swaths of suitable habitat connecting larger patches of suitable habitat in an otherwise unsuitable environment. Using high-resolution GPS data of four large carnivore species, we identified corridors based on animal movement behavior within each individual’s home range and quantified the spatial overlap of these corridors. We thus tested whether corridors were in fact spatial bottle necks in habitat suitability surrounded by unsuitable habitat, and if they could be characterized by their coarse-scale environmental composition.

Results
We found that most individuals used corridors within their home ranges and that several corridors were used simultaneously by individuals of the same species, but also by individuals of different species. When we compared the predicted habitat suitability of corridors and their immediate surrounding area we found, however, no differences.

Conclusions
We could not find a direct correspondence between corridors chosen and used by wildlife on the one hand, and a priori habitat suitability measurements on the other hand. This leads us to speculate that identifying corridors relying on typically-used habitat suitability methods alone may misplace corridors at the level of space use within an individual’s home range. We suggest future studies to rely more on movement data to directly identify wildlife corridors based on the observed behavior of the animals.

Fachgebiet (DDC)

570 Biowissenschaften, Biologie

Schlagwörter

Connectivity, Carnivore conservation, Step selection function

Zitieren

ISO 690

SCHARF, Anne K., Jerrold L. BELANT, Dean E. BEYER, Martin WIKELSKI, Kamran SAFI, 2018. Habitat suitability does not capture the essence of animal-defined corridors. In: Movement Ecology. 2018, 6, 18. eISSN 2051-3933. Available under: doi: 10.1186/s40462-018-0136-2

BibTex

@article{Scharf2018Habit-43916,
  year={2018},
  doi={10.1186/s40462-018-0136-2},
  title={Habitat suitability does not capture the essence of animal-defined corridors},
  volume={6},
  journal={Movement Ecology},
  author={Scharf, Anne K. and Belant, Jerrold L. and Beyer, Dean E. and Wikelski, Martin and Safi, Kamran},
  note={Article Number: 18}
}

RDF

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