Abstract
Animal movement and resource selection across the landscape plays a critical role in ecological processes, wildlife management, and conservation efforts. Understanding how animals move through landscapes to exploit heterogeneously distributed resources is critical to their conservation and management. This is becoming increasingly important in light of mounting development activities, climate change, and environmental changes that could disrupt access to resources and landscape connectivity. The ability of an animal to traverse the landscape to access resources and their decisions affecting movement patterns have implications for individual fitness and the conservation of populations. Understanding these decisions and the factors driving consequent space-use patterns have important conservation implications. Resource selection studies have emerged as a valuable tool for understanding these phenomena. Nevertheless, investigations into animal movement and resource selection are presented with some challenges. Among these challenges are identifying predictive environmental covariates, scale, defining availability, modeling and statistical constraints, temporal fluxes in resources, and the varying needs and objectives of animals across seasons.
This dissertation consists of four chapters investigating Kodiak brown bear (Ursus arctos middendorffi) movements and resource selection. We explore brown bear exploitation of spatio-temporal patterns of sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) spawning across the landscape (Chapter 1); characterization of brown bear travel paths to move among and exploit sockeye salmon spawning areas across the landscape; (Chapter 2); the influence of local sockeye salmon spawning timing and abundance on Kodiak brown bear patterns of exploitation (Chapter 3); and post-den emergence habitat selection (Chapter 4).