Heading for the hills? Evaluating spatial distribution of woodland caribou in response to a growing anthropogenic disturbance footprint

• Published in: Ecology and Evolution
• Main Authors: MacNearney, D. (Doug), Pigeon, K.E. (Karine E.), Stenhouse, G. (Gordon), Nijland, W. (Wiebe), Coops, N.C. (Nicholas C.), Finnegan, L. (Laura)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: Philopatry; range fidelity; range shift; spatial ecology; UD overlap; utilization distribution overlap index; winter severity; Rangifer tarandus
• Online Access: https://ir.library.carleton.ca/pub/27267; https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.2362

Anthropogenic landscape change (i.e., disturbance) is recognized as an important factor in the decline and extirpation of wildlife populations. Understanding and monitoring the relationship between wildlife distribution and disturbance is necessary for effective conservation planning. Many studies consider disturbance as a covariate explaining wildlife behavior. However, we propose that there are several advantages to considering the spatial relationship between disturbance and wildlife directly using utilization distributions (UDs), including objective assessment of the spatially explicit overlap between wildlife and disturbance, and the ability to track trends in this relationship over time. Here, we examined how central mountain woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) distribution changed ov