Current methods to model species habitat use through space and diel time are limited. Development of such models is critical when considering rapidly changing habitats where species are forced to adapt to anthropogenic change, often by shifting their diel activity across space. We use an occupancy modeling framework to specify the multi-state diel occupancy model (MSDOM), which can evaluate species diel activity against continuous response variables which may impact diel activity within and across seasons or years. We used two case studies, fosa in Madagascar and coyote in Chicago, USA, to conceptualize the application of this model and to quantify the impacts of human activity on species spatial use in diel time. We found support that both species varied their habitat use by diel states—in and across years, and by human disturbance. Our results exemplify the importance of understanding animal diel activity patterns and how human disturbance can lead to temporal habitat loss. The MSDOM will allow more focused attention in ecology and evolution studies on the importance of the short temporal scale of diel time in animal-habitat relationships and lead to improved habitat conservation and management.

Instructions on how the dataset was collected can be found in:

Rivera, K., Fidino, M., Farris, Z. J., Magle, S. B., Murphy, A., and Gerber, B. D. (in press). Rethinking habitat occupancy modeling and the role of diel activity in an anthropogenic world. American Naturalist.

Data was cleaned and analyzed in R and is stored on Zenodo. Both data and code can be found in:

Brian Gerber; Mason Fidino; Kimberly Rivera (2022): zenodo_retry (v1.1) [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6014030.

If you would like to see the readMe file for the Zenodo repository rendered, you can see the same code on GitHub at:

https://github.com/bgerber123/multi.state.diel.occupancy.model

See dryad_readme.pdf for details.