Session Information
| Session | Poster Session | | Date | Monday (2008-04-07) | | Time | 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM | | Room | Grand Terrace |
Presentation Information
| Presenter | Benjamin Pauli | | Title | Modeling the spatially explicit animal response to composition of habitat (SEARCH): Considering the importance of behavior | | Affiliation | Purdue University | | Authors | Benjamin Pauli, Nicholas McCann, Robert Cummings, Patrick Zollner | | Keywords | Behavior, Dispersal, Individual-based model, Recolonization, Spatially explicit | | Presentation Type | Poster | Abstract:
Spatially explicit population models (SEPMs) show promise as tools for conservation, but have been criticized as being behaviorally minimalist. Behavior is important because it influences patterns of animal movement, is temporally dynamic, and can vary at fine spatial and temporal scales. To investigate questions related to underlying behavioral mechanisms that occur at fine scales, we present a SEPM that allows researchers to simulate animal dispersal across complex, realistic landscapes while modeling a range of search processes and habitat selection rules. SEARCH can be used to simulate the spatially explicit response of medium and wide-ranging, solitary animals to habitat composition over multiple successive dispersal seasons, at fine temporal resolutions, on temporally dynamic, high-resolution landscapes. Within SEARCH, animals move across a vector-based landscape of four GIS layers, with values assigned to each point in space on each layer to reflect animals’ response to habitat characteristics (e.g., movement sinuosity and energy use). Dynamic landscapes can be simulated in SEARCH to reflect changes in habitat quality and/or spatial arrangement by replacing any combination of the landscape maps at times and dates scheduled by the user. Animals in SEARCH are parameterized by the user to reflect behavior, energetics, and home range requirements. Furthermore, baseline landscape and animal parameter values can be modified by the user to reflect variability caused by gender, activity mode, behavioral mode, time of day, and date. Dispersing animals retain memory of habitat suitability and occupancy and query their memory in combination with user-parameterized selection rules to locate and delineate home ranges. As SEARCH can be run for multiple years, stochastic reproduction is modeled and resident females reproduce annually, giving birth to a user-parameterized number of young. Output at the individual-level includes the animal location, energetics data, risk of predation, movement parameters at each time step, and shapefiles depicting the area perceived during dispersal. At the population-level, shapefiles depicting the arrangement of home ranges are produced and population demographics (e.g., age structure) can be constructed from individual-level data. SEARCH’s numerous fine-scale inputs and range of behavioral parameters make it a useful tool for investigating basic and applied questions related to behavioral mechanisms for numerous solitary animals in a diversity of study systems. To demonstrate SEARCH’s capabilities, we describe our use of SEARCH to investigate American marten (Martes americana) dispersal in Wisconsin in response to several forest management plans and raccoon (Procyon lotor) recolonization of forest patches following local extirpation in Indiana. |
|