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Landscape-Level Wolf Space Use Is Correlated With Prey Abundance, Ease Of Mobility And The Distribution Of Prey Habitat, Andrew M. Kittle, Morgan Anderson, Tal Avgar, James A. Baker, Glen S. Brown, Jevon Hagens, Ed Iwachewski, Scott Moffatt, Anna Mosser, Brent R. Patterson, Douglas E. B. Reid, Arthur R. Rodgers, Jen Shuter, Garrett M. Street, Ian D. Thompson, Lucas M. Vander Vennen, John M. Fryxell

Wildland Resources Faculty Publications

Predator space use influences ecosystem dynamics, and a fundamental goal assumed for a foraging predator is to maximize encounter rate with prey. This can be achieved by disproportionately utilizing areas of high prey density or, where prey are mobile and therefore spatially unpredictable, utilizing patches of their prey's preferred resources. A third, potentially complementary strategy is to increase mobility by using linear features like roads and/or frozen waterways. Here, we used novel population-level predator utilization distributions (termed "localized density distributions") in a single-predator (Wolf), two-prey (moose and caribou) system to evaluate these space-use hypotheses. The study was conducted in contrasting …