After discussing several options, a very abstract and basic landscape structure was decided on to try to answer some fundamental questions important to my on-going research:
1) Can we get a model of jaguar movements working, with plausible daily movements and territory sizes close to those found in real world populations?
2) Does landscape structure seem to influence the way jaguars move around the landscape and does it affect the fitness of individuals and the population as a whole?
3) Can habitat corridors help to increase the connectivity of the landscape and facilitate movement of individuals between habitat patches?
9 landscape structures were defined to help explore these questions, including 3 control landscapes (top row), 3 connected corridors (middle row) and three non-connected corridors (bottom row) :
'Good' habitat here is forest (in green). This is where jaguars will prefer to be. Intermediate habitat is marked in blue, and represented edge habitat; the edge of the forest that meets the non-forest habitat. This is deemed to be less desirable than the forest itself but more desirable than the non-forest habitat. Non-forest (matrix) is coloured beige, and represents any habitat where the jaguar do not want to be; urban areas, agricultural land, roads etc etc.
Landscapes were designed to cover a range of potential options. All designs (bar the first two; the all forest and the 2 distinct habitat patches) have exactly the same amount of forest and matrix habitat. Edge habitat changes depending on the design of the landscape.
The model is designed as a grid, with individual jaguars occupying any one grid cell at a time. Least-cost methodologies are employed so that each habitat has a cost; forest of 1, edge of 5 and non-forest (or matrix) as 25. This represents the strength of the preference of jaguars to any habitat (lower cost equals a much stronger preference).
Next post - more information about jaguar movements and getting territories to develop.
No comments:
Post a Comment