Advocating better habitat use and selection models in bird ecology

Abstract

In the last decades, habitat use and selection has emerged as a basic aspect of bird ecology, due to its importance in natural history, distribution, response to environmental changes, management and conservation of bird species (Cody 1985, Guisan & Thuiller 2005, Engler et al. 2017). Despite the long tradition of the study of habitat use and selection in birds, however, almost 20 years ago, Jones (2001) had noticed ornithologists usually tended to be inconsistent of what habitat use and selection represent, with major implications on their hypothesis and conclusions about bird ecology (Jones 2001). Currently, some confusion between these terms still persists as a general issue in animal ecology (Lele et al. 2013, Boyce et al. 2016, McGarigal et al. 2016). Here, "habitat" is defined as a distinctive set of physical environmental factors that a species uses for survival and reproduction (Jones 2001, Lele et al. 2013). "Habitat use" refers to the way in which an individual or species uses habitats to meet its life history needs (Jones 2001).