Selecting habitat to what purpose? The advantage of exploring the habitat–fitness relationship

Abstract

Abstract. Measures of reproductive success have been recognized in many fields as essential tools to assess the status of populations, species, and communities. However, difficulties in gathering data on reproductive success often prevent researchers from taking advantage of the information offered by those measures. For example, most of habitat selection studies do not include reproductive success in their analysis even though doing so would highly improve our understanding of the habitat selection process. In our study, we aimed to assess to what extent habitat selection choices made by adult individuals are directed to increase their annual reproductive success. We tested this idea by first developing habitat selection models and then relating the results of those models to two measures of reproductive success. Using wolves, Canis lupus, as the study species, we determined that not all habitat selection choices performed by adult wolves were related to their annual reproductive success. The results varied also in relation to the measure of reproductive success used in the analysis and other individual-, group-, and population-level factors. Likely, adult female wolves select habitat characteristics to increase not only their annual reproductive success but also their lifetime reproductive success, for example, by ensuring their own survival and reproductive abilities in subsequent years. Our study suggests that a variety of motivations may govern habitat choices performed by adult individuals and including different measures of fitness in habitat selection studies can improve our understanding of these complex processes.

Assessing the relationship between illegal hunting of ungulates, wild prey occurrence and livestock depredation rate by large carnivores

“…As expected, leopards were more likely to prey on cattle and wolves tended to prey more on sheep/goat which confirms the differences in the predation strategies of these carnivores: open areas are generally more suitable for wolves which are cursorial predators (Uboni, Smith, Stahler, & Vucetich, ), preferring open areas to hunt and killing shoat in open pastures (Behdarvand et al., ; Treves et al., ). Leopards preyed substantially more on cattle perhaps because cattle were more likely to graze in forest habitat, which is suitable for ambush hunting by leopards.…”

Avian fitness consequences match habitat selection at the nest‐site and landscape scale in agriculturally fragmented landscapes

“…Support for adaptive habitat selection beyond the nest scale is rare (Chalfoun & Martin, 2007;Uboni, Smith, Stahler, & Vucetich, 2017; but see Joos et al, 2014;Kosterman, Squires, Holbrook, Pletsher, & Hebblewhite, 2018), with typical explanations including alternative fitness components not measured (i.e., Desare et al, 2014) or anthropogenic disturbance altering traditional fitness cues (i.e., DeCesare, 2012;Weldon and Haddad, 2005). Yet, we found that flycatcher selection for reduced forest cover within 1,200 m showed a clear nest survival benefit.…”

Behavioral modifications lead to disparate demographic consequences in two sympatric species

“…By integrating both chick survival and adult survival simultaneously into our analyses, we attempted to eliminate any unobserved components of such a risk-to-reproduction tradeoff associated with these species. Such unobserved components have been posited as a potential source of ambiguity associated with studies assessing how adaptive habitat selection influences reproductive success and overall fitness (Bloom et al, 2013;Uboni et al, 2017 2002) or if a species is more likely to allocate resources for selfmaintenance. For instance, it has been suggested that scaled quail have adapted to arid and semi-arid regions (such as our study area) by allocating more resources toward self-maintenance rather than toward reproductive output whereas the opposite is true for bobwhite because they evolved under more mesic conditions (Giuliano, Patiño, & Lutz, 1998 (Bacon et al, 2016;Ficetola, Miaud, Pompanon, & Taberlet, 2008).…”

“…Similarly, though many studies illustrate fitness consequences for adults associated with adaptive behavior during the brooding life-history stage (Blomberg et al, 2013;Hagen, Pitman, Sandercock, Robel, & Applegate, 2011;Mangelinckx, Davis, Allen, Sullivan, & Blomberg, 2018;Zhao et al, 2018), rarely have studies linked adaptive brooding behaviors to offspring survival while simultaneously assessing fitness consequences of the attending adults. By decoupling these two demographic consequences, equivocal results may arise when attempting to link adaptive habitat selection to either offspring survival or attending adult survival separately because this pattern in space use may be more beneficial toward an unobserved demographic parameter rather than the observed parameter (Uboni, Smith, Stahler, & Vucetich, 2017). Thus, attempting to understand concurrent demographic trade-offs between offspring survival and adult survival associated with brood habitat selection is important when assessing the conservation implications of these behavioral modifications.…”