Modelling large herbivore movement decisions: Beyond food availability as a predictor of ranging patterns

The ability of animals to adapt to their changing environment will depend in part on shifts in their ranging patterns, but when and why individuals choose to move requires detailed understanding of their decision‐making processes. We develop a simple decision‐making model accounting for resource availability in habitually used ranges. We suggest that disparities between model predictions and animal tracking data indicate additional factors influencing movement decisions, which may be identified given detailed system‐specific knowledge. The model was evaluated using movement data from satellite‐tracked elephants (Loxodonta africana) inhabiting the Amboseli basin in Kenya, moving from savannah areas with low quality but constant resource availability, to areas with temporally constrained higher nutrient availability. Overall, the model fits the data well: There was a good correlation between predicted and observed locations for the combined data from all elephants, but variation between individuals in how well the model fits. For those elephants where model predictions were less successful, additional factors likely to affect movement decisions, including reproduction, anthropogenic threats, memory and perception are suggested. This protocol for building and testing decision‐making models should contribute to success in attempts to preserve sufficient space for large herbivores in their increasingly human‐dominated ecosystems.     

Timing of precipitation in an arid environment: Effects on population performance of a large herbivore

Climate models predict that shifts in temperature and precipitation patterns are likely to occur across the globe. Changing climate will likely have strong effects on arid environments as a result of increased temperatures, increasing frequency and intensity of droughts, and less consistent pulses of rainfall. Therefore, understanding the link between patterns of precipitation, temperature, and population performance of species occupying these environments will continue to increase in importance as climatic shifts occur within these natural ecosystems. We sought to evaluate how individual, maternal, population, and environmental, particularly temperature and precipitation, level factors influence population performance of a large herbivore in an arid environment. We used mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) as a representative species and quantified juvenile survival to test hypotheses about effects of environmental factors on population performance. Precipitation events occurring in mid‐ to late‐pregnancy (January–April) leading to spring green‐up, as indexed by normalized difference in vegetation index, had the strongest positive effect on juvenile survival and recruitment. In addition, larger neonates had an increased probability of survival. Our findings indicate that timing and amount of precipitation prior to parturition have strong influences on maternal nutritional condition, which was passed on to young. These results have important implications for understanding how animal populations may benefit from timing of precipitation during spring and prior to parturition, especially in arid environments.     

Diverse Optical and Photosynthetic Properties in a Neotropical Dry Forest during the Dry Season: Implications for Remote Estimation of Photosynthesis1

Using optical and photosynthetic assays from a canopy access crane, we examined the photosynthetic performance of tropical dry forest canopies during the dry season in Parque Metropolitano, Panama City, Panama. Photosynthetic gas exchange, chlorophyll fluorescence, and three indices derived from spectral reflectance (the normalized difference vegetation index, the simple ratio, and the photochemical reflectance index) were used as indicators of structural and physiological components of photosynthetic activity. Considerable interspecific variation was evident in structural and physiological behavior in this forest stand, which included varying degrees of foliage loss, altered leaf orientation, stomatal closure, and photosystem II downregulation. The normalized difference vegetation index and the simple ratio were closely related to canopy structure and absorbed radiation for most species, but failed to capture the widely divergent photosynthetic behavior among evergreen species exhibiting various degrees of downregulation. The photochemical reflectance index and chlorophyll fluorescence were related indicators of photosynthetic downregulation, which was not detectable with the normalized difference vegetation index or simple ratio. These results suggest that remote sensing methods that ignore downregulation cannot capture within‐stand variability in actual carbon flux for this diverse forest type. Instead, these findings support a sampling approach that derives photosynthetic fluxes from a consideration of both canopy light absorption (e.g., normalized difference vegetation index) and photosynthetic light‐use efficiency (e.g., photochemical reflectance index). Such sampling should improve our understanding of controls on photosynthetic carbon uptake in diverse tropical forest stands.