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Utah State University

Wildland Resources Faculty Publications

Functional response

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

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 Apr 2017

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 …


Greater Sage-Grouse Resource Selection Drives Reproductive Fitness Under A Conifer Removal Strategy, Charles P. Sandford, Michel T. Kohl, Terry A. Messmer, David K. Dahlgren, Avery Cook, Brian R. Wing Jan 2017

Greater Sage-Grouse Resource Selection Drives Reproductive Fitness Under A Conifer Removal Strategy, Charles P. Sandford, Michel T. Kohl, Terry A. Messmer, David K. Dahlgren, Avery Cook, Brian R. Wing

Wildland Resources Faculty Publications

The link between individual variation in resource selection (e.g., functional response) and fitness creates a foundation for understanding wildlife-habitat relationships. Although many anthropogenic activities adversely affect these relationships, it is largely unknown whether projects implemented to benefit wildlife populations actually achieve this outcome. For sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) obligate species such as the greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus; sage-grouse), expansion of juniper (Juniperus spp.) and pinyon-pine (Pinus spp.; conifers) woodlands into sagebrush ecosystems has been identified as a conservation threat. This threat is intensified when a sagebrush ecosystem is bounded by naturally unsuitable habitats. As such, federal, state, …


Linking Rates Of Diffusion And Consumption In Relationto Resources, Tal Avgar, Daniel Kuefler, John M. Fryxell Jun 2011

Linking Rates Of Diffusion And Consumption In Relationto Resources, Tal Avgar, Daniel Kuefler, John M. Fryxell

Wildland Resources Faculty Publications

The functional response is a fundamental model of the relationship between consumer intake rate and resource abundance. The random walk is a fundamental model of animal movement and is well approximated by simple diffusion. Both models are central to our understanding of numerous ecological processes but are rarely linked in ecological theory. To derive a synthetic model, we draw on the common logical premise underlying these models and show how the diffusion and consumption rates of consumers depend on elementary attributes of naturally occurring consumer-resource interactions: the abundance, spatial aggregation, and traveling speed of resources as well as consumer handling …