33
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Effects of environmental features and sport hunting on caribou migration in northwestern Alaska

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Background

          Ungulate movements are influenced by a variety of biotic and abiotic factors, which may affect connectivity between key resource areas and seasonal ranges. In northwestern Alaska, one important question regarding human impacts on ungulate movement involves caribou ( Rangifer tarandus) response to autumn hunting and related aircraft activity. While concerns have been voiced by local hunters about the influence of transporter aircraft and non-local sport hunters, there has been little quantitative analysis of the effects of hunter activity on caribou movement. We utilized a novel spatial dataset of commercial aircraft landing locations and sport hunter camps in and around Noatak National Preserve to analyze resource selection of caribou in autumn for non-local hunting activity and environmental features. We combined step selection functions with randomized shortest paths to investigate whether terrain ruggedness, river width, land cover, and hunting activity (in the form of aircraft landings and sport hunter camps) facilitated or impeded caribou movement. By varying a parameter in the randomized shortest path models, we also explored the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation in movement behavior exhibited by traveling caribou.

          Results

          We found that caribou avoided rugged terrain and areas with more river, forest, and tall shrubs while selecting for areas dominated by tussock tundra and dwarf shrubs. Migration of caribou through Noatak does not appear to be inhibited by sport hunting activity, though this does not preclude the possibility of temporary effects altering availability of caribou for individual hunters. Caribou exhibited exploratory movement, following predictions of a random walk model. This behavior may facilitate the location of remaining patches of high-quality forage prior to the onset of winter, especially during mild autumns.

          Conclusions

          Understanding animal movement behavior is fundamental to protecting critical areas of connectivity and to informing management decisions. Our study identifies migratory connectivity and hotspots of potential conflict among user groups, enabling development of policies that balance human access with species conservation.

          Electronic supplementary material

          The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40462-017-0095-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

          Related collections

          Most cited references82

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Book: not found

          Modeling Survival Data: Extending the Cox Model

          This is a book for statistical practitioners, particularly those who design and analyze studies for survival and event history data. Its goal is to extend the toolkit beyond the basic triad provided by most statistical packages: the Kaplan-Meier estimator, log-rank test, and Cox regression model. Building on recent developments motivated by counting process and martingale theory, it shows the reader how to extend the Cox model to analyse multiple/correlated event data using marginal and random effects (frailty) models. It covers the use of residuals and diagnostic plots to identify influential or outlying observations, assess proportional hazards and examine other aspects of goodness of fit. Other topics include time-dependent covariates and strata, discontinuous intervals of risk, multiple time scales, smoothing and regression splines, and the computation of expected survival curves. A knowledge of counting processes and martingales is not assumed as the early chapters provide an introduction to this area. The focus of the book is on actual data examples, the analysis and interpretation of the results, and computation. The methods are now readily available in SAS and S-Plus and this book gives a hands-on introduction, showing how to implement them in both packages, with worked examples for many data sets. The authors call on their extensive experience and give practical advice, including pitfalls to be avoided. Terry Therneau is Head of the Section of Biostatistics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. He is actively involved in medical consulting, with emphasis in the areas of chronic liver disease, physical medicine, hematology, and laboratory medicine, and is an author on numerous papers in medical and statistical journals. He wrote two of the original SAS procedures for survival analysis (coxregr and survtest), as well as the majority of the S-Plus survival functions. Patricia Grambsch is Associate Professor in the Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota. She has collaborated extensively with physicians and public health researchers in chronic liver disease, cancer prevention, hypertension clinical trials and psychiatric research. She is a fellow the American Statistical Association and the author of many papers in medical and statistical journals.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Uninformative Parameters and Model Selection Using Akaike's Information Criterion

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              The application of ‘least-cost’ modelling as a functional landscape model

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                001-907-272-9453 , tim_fullman@tws.org
                kyle_joly@nps.gov
                aackerman91@gmail.com
                Journal
                Mov Ecol
                Mov Ecol
                Movement Ecology
                BioMed Central (London )
                2051-3933
                1 March 2017
                1 March 2017
                2017
                : 5
                : 4
                Affiliations
                [1 ]The Wilderness Society, 705 Christensen Drive, Anchorage, AK 99501 USA
                [2 ]National Park Service, Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, Arctic Inventory and Monitoring Network, 4175 Geist Rd., Fairbanks, AK 99709 USA
                [3 ]National Park Service, Western Arctic National Parklands, 4175 Geist Rd., Fairbanks, AK 99709 USA
                Article
                95
                10.1186/s40462-017-0095-z
                5331706
                2ee10132-dbaf-43e7-9e22-a757cb79df4f
                © The Author(s). 2017

                Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

                History
                : 25 October 2016
                : 2 February 2017
                Funding
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100001393, Wilburforce Foundation;
                Categories
                Research
                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2017

                aircraft,alaska,caribou,hunting,migration,movement,noatak national preserve,rangifer tarandus,resource selection

                Comments

                Comment on this article