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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Pete Robertson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2018 Kenward et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. An animal's home-range can be expected to encompass the resources it requires for surviving or reproducing. Thus, animals inhabiting a heterogeneous landscape, where resource patches vary in size, shape and distribution, will naturally have home-ranges of varied sizes, so that each home-range encompasses a minimum required amount of a resource. Homerange size can be estimated from telemetry data, and often key resources, or proxies for them such as the areas of important habitat types, can be mapped. We propose a new method, Resource-Area-Dependence Analysis (RADA), which uses a sample of tracked animals and a categorical map to i) infer in which map categories important resources are accessible, ii) within which home range cores they are found, and iii) estimate the mean minimum areas of these map categories required for such resource provision. We provide three examples of applying RADA to datasets of radio-tracked animals from southern England: 15 red squirrels Sciurus vulgaris, 17 gray squirrels S. carolinensis and 114 common buzzards Buteo buteo. The analyses showed that each red squirrel required a mean (95% CL) of 0.48 ha (0.24-0.97) of pine wood within the outermost home-range, each gray squirrel needed 0.34 ha (0.11-1.12) ha of mature deciduous woodland and 0.035-0.046 ha of wheat, also within the outermost home-range, while each buzzard required 0.54 ha (0.35-0.82) of rough ground close to the home-range center and 14 ha (11-17) of meadow within an intermediate core, with 52% of them also relying on 0.41 ha (0.29-0.59) of suburban land near the homerange center. RADA thus provides a useful tool to infer key animal resource requirements during studies of animal movement and habitat use.
Author(s): Kenward RE, Arraut EM, Robertson PA, Walls SS, Casey NM, Aebischer NJ
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: PLoS ONE
Year: 2018
Volume: 13
Issue: 10
Online publication date: 24/10/2018
Acceptance date: 11/10/2018
Date deposited: 13/11/2018
ISSN (electronic): 1932-6203
Publisher: Public Library of Science
URL: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206354
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0206354
PubMed id: 30356319
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