Animal Space Use

Back in 1994 I enjoyed an unforgettable and extremely inspiring 2-month stay at University of Tennessee, visiting professor Stuart L. Pimm (Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) and Professor Mike L. Pelton (Department of Forestry, Wildlife and Fishery). During some hectic weeks I worked on transforming the mathematical formulation of the Zoomer model for complex population dynamics into a spatially explicit simulation model (Stuart’s lab) in parallel with interaction with many dedicated students of the biology and ecology of black bear Ursus americanu s (Mike’s lab).The Zoomer model is published in my book and already commented on this blog. Regarding the stay at Mike’s lab we published a test on the bears’ general space use, where we found close compliance with the Multi-scaled random walk model, MRW (Gautestad et al. 1998). In this post I revisit the black bear data and find this model’s additional potential to cast light on behavioural ecology in a wildlife management c

While stronger intensity of space use in the standard (Markovian/mechanistic) biophysical model framework is equal to the proxy variable fix density, density=N/area, the complex system analogue is 1/c. This alternative expression for intensity is derived from from the Home range ghost formula I = cN 0.5 = c √N). Below I illustrate the biophysical difference between the two intensity concepts by a simple Figure and some basic mathematics of the respective processes. The extended statistical mechanics of complex space use underscores the importance of estimating and applying a realistic spatial resolution, close to the magnitude of CSSU, when analyzing individual habitat utilization within various habitat classes. The traditional density variable for space use intensity will invoke a large noise term and even spurious results in ecological use/availability analyses of home range data. In statistical-mechanical terms, one of the main discrepancies between the traditional space use mode