Spatial variation in grizzly bear diet across British Columbia ...
Dietary niche variation is a key facet of an animal’s niche and can be a driver of spatial variation in behaviour, population dynamics, and sensitivity to anthropogenic threats. Spatial assessments of the variation of an animal’s dietary niche helps provide key baseline knowledge for the research an...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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University of British Columbia
2024
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| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0441988 https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0441988 |
| Summary: | Dietary niche variation is a key facet of an animal’s niche and can be a driver of spatial variation in behaviour, population dynamics, and sensitivity to anthropogenic threats. Spatial assessments of the variation of an animal’s dietary niche helps provide key baseline knowledge for the research and management of a species and are particularly important for species with large geographic ranges and highly variable niches. Grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) are a wide-ranging omnivorous mammal with enormous dietary flexibility and a species of concern in Canada. I estimated the proportion of vegetation, terrestrial meat, anadromous salmon, and non- anadromous kokanee salmon in the diet of over 1800 grizzly bears via stable isotope analyses of over 2500 guard hair samples collected across the province of British Columbia. Using these estimates, I created fine-scale maps of grizzly bear diet using a parametric generalized additive mixed effects model with spatial random fields. The results of these predictive models ... |
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