The impacts of landscape structure on the winter movements and habitat selection of female red deer

An area of research that has recently gained more attention is to understand how species respond to environmental change such as the landscape structure and fragmentation. Movement is crucial to select habitats but the landscape structure influences the movement patterns of animals. Characterising the movement characteristics, utilisation distribution (UD) and habitat selection of a single species in different landscapes can provide important insights into species response to changes in the landscape. We investigate these three fields in female red deer (Cervus elaphus) in southern Sweden, in order to understand how landscape structure influences their movement and feeding patterns. Movements are compared between two regions, one dominated by a fragmented agriculture-forest mosaic and the other by managed homogenous forest. Red deer in the agriculture-dominated landscape had larger UDs compared to those in the forest-dominated area, moved larger distances between feeding and resting and left cover later in the day but used a similar duration for their movements, suggesting faster travelling speeds between resting and feeding locations. The habitat selection patterns of red deer indicate a trade-off between forage and cover, selecting for habitats that provide shelter during the day and forage by night. However, the level of trade-off, mediated through movement and space use patterns, is influenced by the landscape structure. Our approach provides further understanding of the link between individual animal space use and changing landscapes and can be applied to many species able to carry tracking devices

Habitat quality influences population distribution, individual space use and functional responses in habitat selection by a large herbivore

Identifying factors shaping variation in resource selection is central for our understanding of the behaviour and distribution of animals. We examined summer habitat selection and space use by 108 Global Positioning System (GPS)-collared moose in Norway in relation to sex, reproductive status, habitat quality, and availability. Moose selected habitat types based on a combination of forage quality and availability of suitable habitat types. Selection of protective cover was strongest for reproducing females, likely reflecting the need to protect young. Males showed strong selection for habitat types with high quality forage, possibly due to higher energy requirements. Selection for preferred habitat types providing food and cover was a positive function of their availability within home ranges (i.e. not proportional use) indicating functional response in habitat selection. This relationship was not found for unproductive habitat types. Moreover, home ranges with high cover of unproductive habitat types were larger, and smaller home ranges contained higher proportions of the most preferred habitat type. The distribution of moose within the study area was partly related to the distribution of different habitat types. Our study shows how distribution and availability of habitat types providing cover and high-quality food shape ungulate habitat selection and space use

The COTUR project: remote sensing of offshore turbulence for wind energy application

The paper presents the measurement strategy and data set collected during the COTUR (COherence of TURbulence with lidars) campaign. This field experiment took place from February 2019 to April 2020 on the southwestern coast of Norway. The coherence quantifies the spatial correlation of eddies and is little known in the marine atmospheric boundary layer. The study was motivated by the need to better characterize the lateral coherence, which partly governs the dynamic wind load on multi-megawatt offshore wind turbines. During the COTUR campaign, the coherence was studied using land-based remote sensing technology. The instrument setup consisted of three long-range scanning Doppler wind lidars, one Doppler wind lidar profiler and one passive microwave radiometer. Both the WindScanner software and LidarPlanner software were used jointly to simultaneously orient the three scanner heads into the mean wind direction, which was provided by the lidar wind profiler. The radiometer instrument complemented these measurements by providing temperature and humidity profiles in the atmospheric boundary layer. The scanning beams were pointed slightly upwards to record turbulence characteristics both within and above the surface layer, providing further insight on the applicability of surface-layer scaling to model the turbulent wind load on offshore wind turbines. The preliminary results show limited variations of the lateral coherence with the scanning distance. A slight increase in the identified Davenport decay coefficient with the height is partly due to the limited pointing accuracy of the instruments. These results underline the importance of achieving pointing errors under 0.1∘ to study properly the lateral coherence of turbulence at scanning distances of several kilometres.publishedVersio

Linking Dynamic Habitat Selection with Wading Bird Foraging Distributions across Resource Gradients

Species distribution models (SDM) link species occurrence with a suite of environmental predictors and provide an estimate of habitat quality when the variable set captures the biological requirements of the species. SDMs are inherently more complex when they include components of a species' ecology such as conspecific attraction and behavioral flexibility to exploit resources that vary across time and space. Wading birds are highly mobile, demonstrate flexible habitat selection, and respond quickly to changes in habitat quality; thus serving as important indicator species for wetland systems. We developed a spatio-temporal, multi-SDM framework using Great Egret (Ardea alba), White Ibis (Eudocimus albus), and Wood Stork (Mycteria Americana) distributions over a decadal gradient of environmental conditions to predict species-specific abundance across space and locations used on the landscape over time. In models of temporal dynamics, species demonstrated conditional preferences for resources based on resource levels linked to differing temporal scales. Wading bird abundance was highest when prey production from optimal periods of inundation was concentrated in shallow depths. Similar responses were observed in models predicting locations used over time, accounting for spatial autocorrelation. Species clustered in response to differing habitat conditions, indicating that social attraction can co-vary with foraging strategy, water-level changes, and habitat quality. This modeling framework can be applied to evaluate the multi-annual resource pulses occurring in real-time, climate change scenarios, or restorative hydrological regimes by tracking changing seasonal and annual distribution and abundance of high quality foraging patches