This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A researcher has developed a new, reproducible workflow that lets ecologists measure, in a standardized way, how individual animals within a species differ in their habitat use, based on GPS tracking data. The tool was developed by Dr.
Elina Takola of the Department of Computational Landscape Ecology at the UFZ—Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research. The ecological niche concept describes the set of environmental conditions a species needs to survive and reproduce, but it has traditionally been applied at the species or population level—even though individual animals are known to vary widely in behavior, diet and habitat choice. "Individuals belonging to the same species do not necessarily use or respond to their environment in the same way.
This variation has traditionally been treated as statistical noise, but now we know that it has important implications for the long-term survival of a species," said Dr. Despite this, few tools exist to translate modern tracking data and space-use patterns into practical, comparable measures of individual habitat specialization. This new workflow, published in the Individual-based Ecology journal, aims to address this gap.
Working at the individual level, it treats each animal's personal range of habitat conditions as its own "individualized niche," distinguishing for each individual between the conditions it actually uses (its realized niche) and the conditions available to it but not necessarily used (its potential niche). These concepts were defined in a previous study by E. Takola has now taken these concepts a step further, translating them into a practical workflow for studying individual animals in the wild.
To achieve this, it combines mixed-effects resource selection functions—statistical models that estimate both average habitat preferences and how much individuals deviate from that average—with hypervolume exploration methods, which map all the environmental conditions an individual could occupy as a multidimensional space. Implemented entirely in R, the workflow draws on tools from ecological niche modeling, behavioral ecology and spatial ecology. The workflow is divided into three stages: data preparation, analysis and output generation.
Throughout, it distinguishes between the environmental conditions available to an individual and the conditions it actually uses, allowing researchers to quantify niche breadth, or how broad or narrow an individual's habitat use is; niche overlap, or how much individuals' habitat use overlaps with one another; and repeatability—how consistent an individual's habitat use is over time. The lapwing case study puts this into practice. Using publicly available GPS tracking data from 13 northern lapwings, the study shows how the workflow integrates multiple environmental layers, including earthworm abundance, human presence, pesticides, management, soil variables and vegetation.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
