The moose is Minnesota’s largest wild animal. In December 2012 moose were proposed as a species of special concern under Minnesota law due to their population decline (Baker, 2012). Time series analysis of the northeast Minnesota moose population estimates conducted by Lenarz (2012) found a significant decline between 2005 and 2012. Moose habitat lacks highly specific requirements, depending mo...

Support vector machine (SVM) was used to analyze the occurrence of roach in Flemish stream basins (Belgium). Several habitat and physico?chemical variables were used as inputs for the model development. The biotic variable merely consisted of abundance data which was used for predicting presence/absence of roach. Genetic algorithm (GA) was combined with SVM in order to select the most important...

Given a choice of habitats in a laboratory experiment, whiting Merlangius merlangus preferentially spent most time over sand, then gravel and least time over a habitat with emergent structures. The introduction of a predator stimulus increased the preference for the sand habitat for large whiting, whereas small whiting had an increased preference for the habitat with emergent structures. # 2004...

The study of habitat use and selection in birds has a long tradition (Grinnell 1917, Kendeigh 1945, Svardson 1949, Hild6n 1965; Block and Brennan 1993). Early habitat-selection theory was characterized by correlative models of habitat characteristics and species abundance (MacArthur and Pianka 1966, Verner et al. 1986, Rosenzweig 1991), which subsequently evolved into models that involved densi...

Adaptation to novel conditions beyond current range boundaries requires the presence of suitable sites within dispersal range, but may be impeded when emigrants encounter poor habitat and sharply different selection pressures. We investigated fine-scale spatial heterogeneity in ecological dynamics and selection at a local population boundary of the annual plant Gilia tricolor. In two years, we ...

Animal habitat selection is a process that functions at multiple, hierarchically. structured spatial scales. Thus multi-scale analyses should be the basis for inferences about factors driving the habitat selection process. Vertebrate herbivores forage selectively on the basis of phytochemistry, but few studies have investigated the influence of selective foraging (i.e., fine-scale habitat selec...

Because of birds’ mobility, behaviour and many species’ migratory nature, they select repeatedly and spatially among habitats and have been central figures in studies of avian breeding habitat selection during the 20th and 21st centuries. The scientific literature on habitat use by breeding waterfowl has origins dating back to the writings of Charles Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle, wherein ...

Animal habitat selection, among other ecological phenomena, is spatially scale dependent. Habitat selection by American beavers Castor canadensis (hereafter, beaver) has been studied at singular spatial scales, but to date no research addresses multi-scale selection. Our objectives were to determine if beaver habitat selection was specialized to semiaquatic habitats and if variables explaining ...

Habitat selection is an active behavioral process that may vary across spatial and temporal scales. Animals choose an area of primary utilization (i.e., home range) then make decisions focused on resource needs within patches. Dominance may affect the spatial distribution of conspecifics and concomitant habitat selection. Size-dependent social dominance hierarchies have been documented in capti...

It has long been suggested that birds select habitat hierarchically, progressing from coarser to finer spatial scales. This hypothesis, in conjunction with the realization that many organisms likely respond to environmental patterns at multiple spatial scales, has led to a large number of avian habitat studies that have attempted to quantify habitat associations at multiple scales. Typically, m...