E&E seminar will be from Tessa Rhinehart from the Kitzes lab will be presenting their research titled:
Title: The Secret Lives of Birds: Passive monitoring challenges assumptions about animals’ behavior
Friday, January 29, 2025
A219B Langley Hall
12:00 PM
An understanding of species’ distributions - where they live and why they are found there - is fundamental to both ecology and conservation. To model species distributions, ecologists typically collect surveys of species’ presence across large scales and apply statistical models that account for species nondetections in surveys. However, these models often fail to account for the role animal behavior plays in species occurrence and detectability. This omission can lead to significant inaccuracies in species’ ranges and habitat associations.
This presentation discusses three ways in which passive sensors improve our ability to incorporate animal behavior into species distribution models. First, abundance-based models assume consistent relationships between population size and cues detected during surveys, such as calling rates or distance from microphones, but individual animals’ behaviors could violate this assumption. Using an array of synchronized microphones, we tracked individual animals’ behaviors on a fine temporal scale, as well as estimated animal abundance. These data allow us to test the strength of the relationships between cues and abundance, as well as parameterize simulations of animal behavior to better understand its impact on species distribution models. Second, such simulations reveal that animal movements produce unexpected patterns of detections, causing models to significantly misestimate species’ occupancy, or probability of site use. Using detailed, full-season monitoring from passive acoustic recorders enables us to account for this behavior, virtually removing biases in occupancy estimates. Third, such models typically emphasize the importance of plant community covariates as a primary driver of site selection, in part because of the difficulty of surveying other predictors at large scales. Using a novel moth-monitoring camera trap, we can explore spatial mismatches between prey and vegetation, and investigate whether birds select habitats based on vegetation, prey, or both.