When navigating heterogeneous landscapes, large carnivores must balance trade‐offs between multiple goals, including minimizing energetic expenditure, maintaining access to hunting opportunities and avoiding potential risk from humans. The relative importance of these goals in driving carnivore movement likely changes across temporal scales, but our understanding of these dynamics remains limited. Here we quantified how drivers of movement and habitat selection changed with temporal grain for two large carnivore species living in human‐dominated landscapes, providing insights into commonalities in carnivore movement strategies across regions. We used high‐resolution GPS collar data and integrated step selection analyses to model movement and habitat selection for African lions For both species, topographic slope, which strongly influences energetic expenditure, drove habitat selection and movement patterns over fine temporal grains but was less important at longer temporal grains. In contrast, avoiding anthropogenic risk during the day, when risk was highest, was consistently important across grains, but the degree to which carnivores relaxed this avoidance at night was strongest for longer term movements. Lions and pumas modified their movement behaviour differently in response to anthropogenic features: lions sped up while near humans at fine temporal grains, while pumas slowed down in more developed areas at coarse temporal grains. Finally, pumas experienced a trade‐off between energetically efficient movement and avoiding anthropogenic risk. Temporal grain is an important methodological consideration in habitat selection analyses, as drivers of both movement and habitat selection changed across temporal grain. Additionally, grain‐dependent patterns can reflect meaningful behavioural processes, including how fitness‐relevant goals influence behaviour over different periods of time. In applying multi‐scale analysis to fine‐resolution data, we showed that two large carnivore species in very different human‐dominated landscapes balanced competing energetic and safety demands in largely similar ways. These commonalities suggest general strategies of landscape use across large carnivore species.
Rigorous understanding of how environmental conditions impact population dynamics is essential for species conservation, especially in mixed‐use landscapes where source–sink dynamics may be at play. Conservation of large carnivore populations in fragmented, human‐dominated landscapes is critical for their long‐term persistence. However, living in human‐dominated landscapes comes with myriad costs, including direct anthropogenic mortality and sublethal energetic costs. How these costs impact individual fitness and population dynamics are not fully understood, partly due to the difficulty in collecting long‐term demographic data for these species. Here, we analyzed an 11‐year dataset on puma (
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10418088
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Ecological Applications
- Volume:
- 33
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1051-0761
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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