Predicting local and non‐local effects of resources on animal space use using a mechanistic step selection model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Predicting space use patterns of animals from their interactions with the environment is fundamental for understanding the effect of habitat changes on ecosystem functioning. Recent attempts to address this problem have sought to unify resource selection analysis, where animal space use is derived from available habitat quality, and mechanistic movement models, where detailed movement processes of an animal are used to predict its emergent utilization distribution. Such models bias the animal's movement towards patches that are easily available and resource‐rich, and the result is a predicted probability density at a given position being a function of the habitat quality at that position. However, in reality, the probability that an animal will use a patch of the terrain tends to be a function of the resource quality in both that patch and the surrounding habitat. We propose a mechanistic model where this non‐local effect of resources naturally emerges from the local movement processes, by taking into account the relative utility of both the habitat where the animal currently resides and that of where it is moving. We give statistical techniques to parametrize the model from location data and demonstrate application of these techniques to GPS location data of caribou ( R angifer tarandus ) in Newfoundland. Steady‐state animal probability distributions arising from the model have complex patterns that cannot be expressed simply as a function of the local quality of the habitat. In particular, large areas of good habitat are used more intensively than smaller patches of equal quality habitat, whereas isolated patches are used less frequently. Both of these are real aspects of animal space use missing from previous mechanistic resource selection models. Whilst we focus on habitats in this study, our modelling framework can be readily used with any environmental covariates and therefore represents a unification of mechanistic modelling and step selection approaches to understanding animal space use.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".