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A General Approach to Model Movement in (Highly) Fragmented Patch Networks

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Abstract

Landscape heterogeneity can often be represented as a series of discrete habitat or resource patches surrounded by a matrix of non-habitat. Understanding how animals move in such networks of patches is important for many theoretical and applied questions. The probability of going from one patch to another is affected in a non-trivial way by the characteristics and location of other patches in the network. Nearby patches can compete as possible destinations, and a particular patch can be shadowed by neighboring patches. We present a way to account for the effects of the spatial configuration of patches in models of space use where individuals alternate between spending time in a patch and moving to other patches in the network. The approach is based on the original derivation of Ovaskainen and Cornell (J Appl Probab 40:557–580, 2003) for a diffusion model that considered all possible ways in which an individual leaving a particular patch can eventually reach another patch before dying or leaving the patch network. By replacing the theoretical results of Ovaskainen and Cornell by other appropriate functions, we provide generality and thus make their approach useful in contexts where diffusion is not a good approximation of movement. Furthermore, we provide ways to estimate time spent in the non-habitat matrix when going from patch to patch and implement a method to incorporate the effect of the history of previous visits on future patch use. We present an MCMC way to fit these models to data and illustrate the approach with both simulated data and data from sheep moving among seasonally flooded meadows in northern Patagonia.Supplementary materials accompanying this paper appear online.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for thorough and useful comments on the manuscript. JMM was supported by CONICET and by PIP 112 201101 00058. MMD was granted by a Spanish “Ramón y Cajal” contract RYC-2014-16263 and financially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (#CGL2016-79764-P). OO was supported by funding from the Academy of Finland (Grant No. 250444) and the Research Council of Norway (CoE Grant No. 223257).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Grupo de Ecología Cuantitativa. INIBIOMA-CRUB, CONICET. Av. Pioneros 2350 - S.C., de Bariloche, Río Negro, Argentina

    Juan Manuel Morales & Agustina di Virgilio

  2. Research Unit of Biodiversity (UMIB, UO-CSIC-PA), Oviedo University - Campus Mieres, 33600, Mieres, Spain

    María del Mar Delgado

  3. Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 65, 00014 , Helsinki, Finland

    Otso Ovaskainen

  4. Department of Biology, Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Otso Ovaskainen

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  1. Juan Manuel Morales
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  2. Agustina di Virgilio
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  4. Otso Ovaskainen
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Correspondence to Juan Manuel Morales.

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Morales, J.M., di Virgilio, A., del Mar Delgado, M. et al. A General Approach to Model Movement in (Highly) Fragmented Patch Networks. JABES 22, 393–412 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13253-017-0298-1

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