Life Sciences Commons^™

Linking Behavioral States To Landscape Features For Improved Conservation Management, Maitreyi Sur, Jim R. Belthoff

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

1. A central theme for conservation is understanding how animals differentially use, and are affected by change in, the landscapes they inhabit. However, it has been challenging to develop conservation schemes for habitat-specific behaviors.
2. Here we use behavioral change point analysis to identify behavioral states of golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) in the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts of the southwestern United States, and we identify, for each behavioral state, conservation-relevant habitat associations.
3. We modeled behavior using 186,859 GPS points from 48 eagles and identified 2,851 distinct segments comprising four behavioral states. Altitude above ground level (AGL) best differentiated behavioral states, …