Publications by authors named "Jennifer Pohle"
Article Synopsis
- Step-selection models help researchers understand how animals choose their habitats based on their movement patterns, but these patterns can be influenced by unobserved behaviors like resting or foraging.
- * To address this, researchers have developed new methods that combine step-selection analyses with hidden Markov models, enabling the joint estimation of these hidden behaviors and their impact on habitat selection.
- * An extensive study was conducted to compare the effectiveness of this new HMM-iSSA approach with standard methods, and the HMM-iSSA has been made accessible through an R package available on GitHub.
Article Synopsis
- Habitat selection in animals is influenced by behaviors like foraging, predator avoidance, and thermoregulation, and Step-Selection Functions (SSFs) can assess these fine-scale selections based on animal movements and environmental conditions.
- Using a case study of muskoxen, researchers explored how defining behavior-specific availability domains and fitting separate models affects model structure, estimated selection coefficients, and predictive performance.
- Findings revealed that incorporating behavior into availability domains mostly altered model structure, while separate behavior-specific models affected selection strength, improving predictive performance for foraging and relocating but not for resting behaviors.
Patterns of habitat use are commonly studied in horizontal space, but this does not capture the four-dimensional nature of ocean habitats (space, depth, and time). Deep-diving marine animals encounter varying oceanographic conditions, particularly at the poles, where there is strong seasonal variation in vertical ocean structuring. This dimension of space use is hidden if we only consider horizontal movement.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In highly seasonal environments, animals face critical decisions regarding time allocation, diet optimisation, and habitat use. In the Arctic, the short summers are crucial for replenishing body reserves, while low food availability and increased energetic demands characterise the long winters (9-10 months). Under such extreme seasonal variability, even small deviations from optimal time allocation can markedly impact individuals' condition, reproductive success and survival.
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