21054380
not annotated - annotated - LINNAEUS only
The spatial scaling of habitat selection by African elephants.
1. Understanding and accurately predicting the spatial patterns of habitat use by organisms is important for ecological research, biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management. However, this understanding is complicated by the effects of spatial scale, because the scale of analysis affects the quantification of species-environment relationships. 2. We therefore assessed the influence of environmental context (i.e. the characteristics of the landscape surrounding a site), varied over a large range of scales (i.e. ambit radii around focal sites), on the analysis and prediction of habitat selection by African elephants in Kruger National Park, South Africa. 3. We focused on the spatial scaling of the elephants' response to their main resources, forage and water, and found that the quantification of habitat selection strongly depended on the scales at which environmental context was considered. Moreover, the inclusion of environmental context at characteristic scales (i.e. those at which habitat selectivity was maximized) increased the predictive capacity of habitat suitability models. 4. The elephants responded to their environment in a scale-dependent and perhaps hierarchical manner, with forage characteristics driving habitat selection at coarse spatial scales, and surface water at fine spatial scales. 5. Furthermore, the elephants exhibited sexual habitat segregation, mainly in relation to vegetation characteristics. Male elephants preferred areas with high tree cover and low herbaceous biomass, whereas this pattern was reversed for female elephants. 6. We show that the spatial distribution of elephants can be better understood and predicted when scale-dependent species-environment relationships are explicitly considered. This demonstrates the importance of considering the influence of spatial scale on the analysis of spatial patterning in ecological phenomena.
Ann file
T1 Species 44 61 African elephants
N1 Reference T1 Taxonomy:9785 Loxodonta africana
T2 Species 675 692 African elephants
N2 Reference T2 Taxonomy:9785 Loxodonta africana
T3 Out-of-scope 776 785 elephants
N3 Reference T3 Taxonomy:9780 Elephantidae
T4 Out-of-scope 1175 1184 elephants
N4 Reference T4 Taxonomy:9780 Elephantidae
T5 Out-of-scope 1412 1421 elephants
N5 Reference T5 Taxonomy:9780 Elephantidae
T6 Out-of-scope 1515 1524 elephants
N6 Reference T6 Taxonomy:9780 Elephantidae
T7 Out-of-scope 1635 1644 elephants
N7 Reference T7 Taxonomy:9780 Elephantidae
T8 Out-of-scope 1690 1699 elephants
N8 Reference T8 Taxonomy:9780 Elephantidae