Climatically driven changes in primary production propagate through trophic levels.

Climate and land-use change are the major drivers of global biodiversity loss. Their effects are particularly acute for wide-ranging consumers, but little is known about how these factors interact to affect the abundance of large carnivores and their herbivore prey. We analyzed population densities of a primary and secondary consumer (mule deer, Odocoileus hemionus, and mountain lion, Puma concolor) across a climatic gradient in western North America by combining satellite-based maps of plant productivity with estimates of animal abundance and foraging area derived from Global Positioning Systems telemetry data (GPS).

Quantifying animal movement for caching foragers: the path identification index (PII) and cougars, .

Background: Many studies of animal movement have focused on directed versus area-restricted movement, which rely on correlations between step-length and turn-angles and on stationarity through time to define behavioral states. Although these approaches might apply well to grazing in patchy landscapes, species that either feed for short periods on large, concentrated food sources or cache food exhibit movements that are difficult to model using the traditional metrics of turn-angle and step-length alone.

Results: We used GPS telemetry collected from a prey-caching predator, the cougar (), to test whether combining metrics of site recursion, spatiotemporal clustering, speed, and turning into an index of movement using partial sums, improves the ability to identify caching behavior.