Animals select habitat resources at multiple spatial scales. Thus, explicit attention to scale dependency in species–habitat relationships is critical to understand the habitat suitability patterns as perceived by organisms in complex landscapes. Identification of the scales at which particular environmental variables influence habitat selection may be as important as the selection of variables...

Detecting habitat selection depends on the spatial scale of analysis, but multi-scale studies have been limited by the use of a few, spatially variable, hierarchical levels. We developed spatially explicit approaches to quantify selection along a continuum of scales using spatial (coarse-graining) and geostatistical (variogram) pattern analyses at multiple levels of habitat use (seasonal range,...

Background Space use by animals is determined by the interplay between movement and the environment, and is thus mediated by habitat selection, biotic interactions and intrinsic factors of moving individuals. These processes ultimately determine home range size, but their relative contributions and dynamic nature remain less explored. We investigated the role of habitat selection, movement unre...

There has been extensive sea ice loss in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas where two beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas) populations occur between July-November. Our goal was to develop population-specific beluga habitat selection models that quantify relative use of sea ice and bathymetric features related to oceanographic processes, which can provide context to the importance of changing sea ice...

Despite their promise for simulating natural complexity, individual-based models (IBMs) are rarely used for ecological research or resource management. Few IBMs have been shown to reproduce realistic patterns of behavior by individual organisms. To test our IBM of stream salmonids and draw conclusions about foraging theory, we analyzed the IBM’s ability to reproduce six patterns of habitat sele...

Understanding how animals utilize available space is important for their conservation, as it provides insight into the ecological needs of the species, including those related to habitat, prey and inter and intraspecific interactions. We used 28 months of radio telemetry data and information from 200 kill locations to assess habitat selection at the 3rd order (selection of habitats within home ...

BACKGROUND Habitat selection and its adaptive outcomes are crucial features for animal life-history strategies. Nevertheless, congruence between habitat preferences and breeding success has been rarely demonstrated, which may result from the single-scale evaluation of animal choices. As habitat selection is a complex multi-scale process in many groups of animal species, investigating adaptivene...

The role of habitat selection behaviour in the assembly of natural communities is an increasingly important theme in ecology. At the same time, ecologists and conservation biologists are keenly interested in scale and how processes at scales from local to regional interact to determine species distributions and patterns of biodiversity. How important is habitat selection in generating observed ...