Coursing the mottled mosaic: Generalist predators track pulses in availability of neonatal ungulates.

The density and distribution of resources shape animal movement and behavior and have direct implications for population dynamics. Resource availability often is "pulsed" in space and time, and individuals should cue in on resource pulses when the energetic gain of doing so exceeds that of stable resources. Birth pulses of prey represent a profitable but ephemeral resource and should thereby result in shifting functional responses by predators.

Risky business: How an herbivore navigates spatiotemporal aspects of risk from competitors and predators.

Understanding factors that influence animal behavior is central to ecology. Basic principles of animal ecology imply that individuals should seek to maximize survival and reproduction, which means carefully weighing risk against reward. Decisions become increasingly complex and constrained, however, when risk is spatiotemporally variable.

Migration corridors of adult Golden Eagles originating in northwestern North America.

There has been increasing concern for Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) populations in North America due to current and future projections of mortality risk and habitat loss from anthropogenic sources. Identification of high-use movement corridors and bottlenecks for the migratory portion of the eagle population in western North America is an important first step to help habitat conservation and management efforts to reduce the risk of eagle mortality. We used dynamic Brownian Bridge movement models to estimate utilization distributions of adult eagles migrating across the western North America and identified high-use areas by calculating the overlap of individuals on population and regional levels.

Functional attributes of ungulate migration: landscape features facilitate movement and access to forage.

Long-distance migration by terrestrial mammals is a phenomenon critical to the persistence of populations, but such migrations are declining globally because of over-harvest, habitat loss, and movement barriers. Increasingly, there is a need to improve existing routes, mitigate route segments affected by anthropogenic disturbance, and in some instances, determine whether alternative routes are available. Using a hypothesis-driven approach, we identified landscape features associated with the primary functional attributes, stopovers and movement corridors, of spring migratory routes for mule deer in two study areas using resource selection functions.

Resource waves: phenological diversity enhances foraging opportunities for mobile consumers.

Time can be a limiting constraint for consumers, particularly when resource phenology mediates foraging opportunity. Though a large body of research has explored how resource phenology influences trophic interactions, this work has focused on the topics of trophic mismatch or predator swamping, which typically occur over short periods, at small spatial extents or coarse resolutions. In contrast many consumers integrate across landscape heterogeneity in resource phenology, moving to track ephemeral food sources that propagate across space as resource waves.

Large herbivores surf waves of green-up during spring.

The green wave hypothesis (GWH) states that migrating animals should track or 'surf' high-quality forage at the leading edge of spring green-up. To index such high-quality forage, recent work proposed the instantaneous rate of green-up (IRG), i.e.