عنوان

Fine-Scale Movements and Habitat Selection of Eastern Wild Turkeys in Mississippi

TL52597

انگلیسی

Fine-Scale Movements and Habitat Selection of Eastern Wild Turkeys in Mississippi

[Thesis]

Almond, John Conner

Wang, Guiming

Mississippi State University

2020

74 p.

M.S.

Mississippi State University

2020

An important theme of wildlife ecology is understanding how animals move through their landscapes and inferring the strategies of resource acquisition. Eastern wild turkeys (Meleagris gallapavo silvestris) are a model species for evaluating the responses of movements and habitat selection to spatiotemporal variability of resources. I hypothesized that scales of area-restricted search (ARS) would change with variation in the landscape. I identified the ARS locations of high first passage time values using segmentation algorithms and hidden Markov models, and evaluated spatial variations in habitat selection for foraging-like activities of wild turkeys using Dirichlet multinomial models. The ARS scale for daily movement paths did not change over time substantially. Wild turkeys placed home ranges in heterogeneous landscapes to maximize forage availability. However, continuous-time Markov chain models demonstrated that habitat selection varied between individuals indicating that fine-scale selection may depend on the local resource availability and status of individuals.

Wildlife conservation

Wildlife management

Almond, John Conner

Wang, Guiming

Mississippi State University

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y