Understanding how organisms selectively use resources is essential for designing wildlife management strategies. The probability that an individual uses a given resource, as characterized by environmental factors, can be quantified in terms of the resource selection probability function (RSPF). The present literature on the topic has claimed that, except when both used and unused sites are know...

A common population characteristic of interest in animal ecology studies pertains to the selection of resources. That is, given the resources available to animals, what do they ultimately choose to use? A variety of statistical approaches have been employed to examine this question and each has advantages and disadvantages with respect to the form of available data and the properties of estimat...

Ecological indicators are useful tools to analyse and communicate historical changes in ecosystems and plausible future scenarios while evaluating environmental status. Here we introduce a new plug-in to the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) food web modelling approach, which is widely used to quantitatively describe aquatic ecosystems. The plug-in (ECOIND) calculates standardized ecological indicators...

Organisms may reduce uncertainty regarding how best to exploit their environment by collecting information about resource distribution. We develop a model to demonstrate how competition can facilitate or constrain an individual's ability to use information when acquiring resources. As resource distribution underpins both selection on information use and the strength and nature of competition be...

M ulti-scale resource selection m odeling is used to identify factors th a t limit species distributions across scales o f space and time. This m ulti-scale nature o f hab ita t suitability com plicates the translation o f inferences to single, spatial depictions o f hab ita t required for conservation o f species. W e estim ated resource selection functions (R SFs) across three scales for a th...

Multi-scale resource selection modeling is used to identify factors that limit species distributions across scales of space and time. This multi-scale nature of habitat suitability complicates the translation of inferences to single, spatial depictions of habitat required for conservation of species. We estimated resource selection functions (RSFs) across three scales for a threatened ungulate,...

Species distribution modelling is central to both fundamental and applied research in biogeography. Over the past 10 years species distribution models have become commonplace in studies of biogeography, conservation biology, ecology, palaeoecology and wildlife management. Model fitting is usually based on pattern-recognition approaches, whereby associations between geographic occurrence of a sp...

Dams have made important contributions to human development, and the benefits derived from them have been considerable (World Commission on Dams, 2000). With the rising global population and desire to increase quality of life, dams are prominently staged to deliver hydropower, irrigation and drinking water supplies, recreation, navigation, and many other resources to the growing planet. Further...

Species habitat suitability models rarely incorporate multiple spatial scales or functional shapes of a species’ response to covariates. Optimizing for these factors may produce more robust, reliable, and informative models, which can be beneficial the conservation rare endangered species, such as tigers (Panthera tigris). We provide first formal assessment relative impacts scale-optimization s...

In North America, impassable, man-made barriers block access to salmonid spawning habitat and require costly restoration efforts in the remaining habitats. Evaluating restored quality requires information on salmon water velocity depth preferences, which may vary relation other variables (e.g., temperature). We demonstrate a generalizable, low-cost method gather analyze these data by combining ...