Integrating spaceborne estimates of structural diversity of habitat into wildlife occupancy models
Vegetation structure is a crucial dimension of wildlife habitat, responsive to global changes in human activities and ecosystem processes. NASA’s recent Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) provides an exciting opportunity to explore how spaceborne waveform observations can improve our abi...
| Published in: | Environmental Research Letters |
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
IOP Publishing
2023
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/acce4d https://doaj.org/article/70e78c6376344650868447786e59cd5d |
| Summary: | Vegetation structure is a crucial dimension of wildlife habitat, responsive to global changes in human activities and ecosystem processes. NASA’s recent Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) provides an exciting opportunity to explore how spaceborne waveform observations can improve our ability to measure wildlife habitat and advance animal ecology in the Anthropocene. We tested the utility of GEDI data in univariate occupancy models to estimate habitat use in a remote mountain system in central Idaho, USA. We collected data from 49 camera trap stations from two surveys in 2018–2019 and modeled the occupancy for each of seven mammal species representing different trophic levels and feeding strategies: American black bear ( Ursus americanus ), deer ( Odocoileus hemionus ), elk ( Cervus canadensis ), moose ( Alces alces ), coyote ( Canis latrans ), wolf ( Canis lupus ), and mountain lion ( Puma concolor ). We first derived structural diversity indices (richness, evenness, and divergence) of GEDI-derived canopy height, plant area index, and foliage height diversity to represent different dimensions of vegetation structure. This spatial aggregation is necessary due to gaps in GEDI footprints and parallels commonly used functional diversity metrics applied to biological communities that are calculated using trait probability densities. We measured these indices across three spatial scales that reflect different species movement and habitat selection patterns. We found the structural diversity indices of canopy height, foliage height diversity, and plant area index had the strongest effects on the occupancy of most mammals compared to two-dimensional (2D) variables (e.g. tree cover, normalized difference vegetation index). The spatial extent of these indices also influenced the strength of response, highlighting the importance of selecting a scale large enough to capture sufficient GEDI footprints but small enough to reflect site-level variance. Compared to 2D covariates, our results suggest that GEDI ... |
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