Data from: Study "Ya Ha Tinda elk project, Banff National Park, 2001-2020 (females)"

Hebblewhite, Mark; Merrill, Evelyn H.; Martin, Hans; Berg, Jodi; Bohm, Holger; Eggeman, Scott

doi:10.5441/001/1.5g4h5t6c

Cited by 3 publications

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A follow‐up assessment of wildlife‐permeable fences used in the reintroduction of bison

Watt,

Whittington,

Heuer

2024

Wildlife Biology

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Fences are an important tool for anchoring reintroduced species to a target area, and there is a need to understand their effect on other wildlife species. However, little is understood about the response of wildlife to newly constructed fences over time. We evaluated fences used in the reintroduction of plains bison Bison bison to Banff National Park, Canada. These fences were designed to contain reintroduced bison while allowing for the free passage of other wildlife. In 2020, we provided an assessment of the permeability of several fence designs. Here, we investigated longer‐term fence effects and addressed the emerging question of whether wildlife adapt their behaviours to navigate fences more effectively over time. We used an expanded array of remote cameras and a before‐after‐control‐impact design to evaluate changes in detection probability for 12 species. Next, we tested for changes in crossing rates and travel speeds of migratory elk Cervus canadensis using 22 years of GPS collar data. Finally, we examined whether species detections or elk movements changed over time after fences were constructed. Changes in detection probability near fences were inconsistent between species. Elk fence crossing rates decreased after fence construction, and travel speeds slowed by a negligible amount. However, these effects were temporary – wildlife learned to cross fences more efficiently over time. Elk movement metrics followed a non‐linear pattern after the appearance of fences and began returning to pre‐fence states after approximately two years. Our study provides new information on the implementation of fences for conservation objectives while minimizing impacts on sympatric wildlife.

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A follow‐up assessment of wildlife‐permeable fences used in the reintroduction of bison

Watt,

Whittington,

Heuer

2024

Wildlife Biology

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MoveFormer: a Transformer-based model for step-selection animal movement modelling

Cífka

Chamaillé‐Jammes

2023

Preprint

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The movement of animals is a central component of their behavioural strategies. Statistical tools for movement data analysis, however, have long been limited, and in particular, unable to account for past movement information except in a very simplified way. In this work, we propose MoveFormer, a new step-based model of movement capable of learning directly from full animal trajectories. While inspired by the classical step-selection framework and previous work on the quantification of uncertainty in movement predictions, MoveFormer also builds upon recent developments in deep learning, such as the Transformer architecture, allowing it to incorporate long temporal contexts. The model predicts an animal’s next movement step given its past movement history, including not only purely positional and temporal information, but also any available environmental covariates such as land cover or temperature. We apply our model to a diverse dataset made up of over 1550 trajectories from over 100 studies, and show how it can be used to gain insights about the importance of the provided context features, including the extent of past movement history. Our software, along with the trained model weights, is released as open source.

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Density-Dependent Foraging Behaviors on Sympatric Winter Ranges in a Partially Migratory Elk Population

et al. 2020

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Many large herbivore populations are partially migratory, in which the population is comprised of both non-migratory (resident) and migratory individuals. Densitydependence contributes to regulating the dynamics of partially migratory populations by altering habitat selection, vital rates, or rates of behavioral switching between migratory tactics. Studies of mechanisms leading to these shifts have focused mainly on their behavior on summer range, overlooking the potential for density-dependent effects during winter that may influence decisions to migrate. We hypothesized that competition for food and safety from wolf predation risk on winter ranges would differentially affect habitat selection, movements, and grouping behavior of migrant and resident female North American elk (Cervus canadensis) on their sympatric winter range. We used GPS locations from 92 adult female elk in 155 elk-winters at Ya Ha Tinda, Alberta, Canada, over a 14-year period when the elk population declined by ∼70% to test our hypotheses. Elk showed consistently strong selection for areas of high forage biomass that corresponded to longer residence times and shorter return times to areas of high forage biomass. The strength of the selection diminished at high elk population size as did the extent to which elk traded off forage for safety from wolf predation risk. Elk increased movement rates and extended return times only to the riskiest areas. Median group size and mean sociality among elk increased at low population size, with resident elk groups being larger and more cohesive than migrant groups. Similar density-dependent responses by migrant and resident female elk on sympatric winter range indicate resident elk do not alter foraging behaviors to compensate for exposure to low nutritional resources in summer, implicating seasonal differences in nutrition are not mediated by winter densities in this system. We discuss the implications of competition on winter ranges for the maintenance of partial migration in ungulates in montane systems.

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Data from: Study "Ya Ha Tinda elk project, Banff National Park, 2001-2020 (females)"

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

A follow‐up assessment of wildlife‐permeable fences used in the reintroduction of bison

A follow‐up assessment of wildlife‐permeable fences used in the reintroduction of bison

MoveFormer: a Transformer-based model for step-selection animal movement modelling

Density-Dependent Foraging Behaviors on Sympatric Winter Ranges in a Partially Migratory Elk Population

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