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.
Conserving large carnivores requires protecting landscape spaces that encompass all spatiotemporal scales of their movement. Large carnivores normally roam widely, but habitat loss and fragmentation can constrain their movement in ways that restrict access to resources and increase encounters with humans and potential conflict. Facilitating carnivore population coexistence with humans across landscapes requires conservation plans informed by patterns of carnivore space use, particularly at the human–wildlife interface. We sought to understand lion space use in Laikipia, Kenya. We conducted a path‐selection function analysis using GPS collar data from 16 lions to assess patterns of space use across a range of spatial scales (sedentary to home range expanses; 0, 12.5, 25 and 50 km) and temporal scales (day, dusk, night and dawn). Path‐selection results were then incorporated into space use maps. We found that most landscape features influenced path‐selection at the broadest spatial scale (50 km), representative of home range‐wide movement, thereby demonstrating a landscape‐wide human impact on lion space use. We also detected sub‐diurnal variation in lion path‐selection which revealed limited space use during daylight hours and increased space use overnight. Our results highlight that optimal support for human–lion coexistence should be temporally adaptive at sub‐diurnal scales. Furthermore, spatial approaches to lion conservation may be better generalized at broad spatial scales so that land management plans can account for home range patterns in lion space use.
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10464495
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Ecological Solutions and Evidence
- Volume:
- 4
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2688-8319
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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