Data from: Hierarchy in structuring of resource selection: Understanding elk selection across space, time, and movement strategies
Data files
Feb 27, 2025 version files 2.08 GB
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Crews_etal_Elk_RSF_Hierarchy_Data.csv
2.08 GB
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README.md
2.27 KB
Abstract
Movement is a fundamental aspect of animal ecology that varies across space, time, and among individuals or groups within a population. Broad scale patterns of animal movement are often classified into different movement strategies such as resident, nomadic, and migratory. While landscape-level environmental patterns can predict the presence of different movement strategies in an area, elucidating how these patterns downscale to fine-scale resource selection behaviors remains a challenge. Partially migratory systems, where both migrants and residents coexist, offer a unique opportunity to address these questions. Using tracking data from four Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus canadensis) herds situated primarily within Colorado, USA, we assessed between-herd, seasonal, and within-herd variation in resource selection behavior. We modelled fine-scale seasonal resource selection and compared strategy-specific behaviors using resource selection functions. Additionally, we used a consistency score to quantify the extent of differentiation in resource selection behavior across strategies, seasons, herds, and groups of covariates. We found variation in strategy frequency within each herd and in selection behavior, highlighting the complexity and context-dependence of strategy-specific selection. Despite herd-specific differences, some consistent trends emerged, with elk avoiding human development and roads at fine scales while selecting areas with higher productivity during summer. Our consistency analysis identified where elk most diverged in their selection behavior, revealing the greatest differences among herds, followed by variation between seasons, and lastly between movement strategies. Elk exhibited more uniform responses to productivity, contrasting with greater differentiation in responses to anthropogenic-related covariates. Overall, our study improves our understanding of elk behavior across space, time, and movement strategies, and sheds light on the hierarchical influences of space and time in constraining behavior.
https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zkh1893mp
Description of the data and file structure
Crews, S., N. D. Rayl, M. W. Alldredge, E. J. Bergman, C. R. Anderson Jr., E. H. VanNatta, J. D. Holbrook, and G. Bastille-Rousseau. Hierarchy in structuring of resource selection: understanding elk selection across space, time, and movement strategies. Ecology and Evolution.
Crews_etal_Elk_RSF_Hierarchy_Data.csv file with 10677684 rows and 16 columns. Rows contain covariate information for 1306349 used and 9371335 available elk locations from 386 adult female elk monitored in 4 herds in and around Colorado, USA from March 4, 2017 - April 14, 2022. Note that these locations exclude periods categorized as ‘migration’, which were used in the classification of movement strategies, but not in generation of resource selection functions. Additionally, this data set excludes instances where the NDVI value was NA due to data insufficiency during processing of satellite imagery products. The file contains columns with the unique elk-year identifier (“id”), the herd of the elk-year (“herd”), the movement strategy classification of the elk-year (“movement_strategy”), the date/timestamp in local Mountain Time (“timestamp”), the seasonal time period e.g. Winter or Summer (“season”), the field season/year in which the elk was collared (“year_tagged”), the used/available classification (“used”; 1 = used, 0 = available), the distance to anthropogenic feature in meters (“dist_to_feature”) and the transformed distance to anthropogenic feature (i.e. added 1 and applied the natural logarithm to values and then scaled; “dist_to_feature_log_scaled”), the daily interpolated normalized difference vegetation index (“ndvi”) and the scaled daily interpolated normalized difference vegetation index (“ndvi_scaled”), the land cover type (“crops”, “forest”, “herbaceous”, “other”; value is 1 where the land cover is of a given type and 0 outside of this), and the unique combination id-season-year identifier (“id_season_year”).
