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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 22, 2025

Modeling the Size Spectrum for Macroinvertebrates and Fishes in Stream Ecosystems

Modeling the Size Spectrum for Macroinvertebrates and Fishes in Stream Ecosystems

Published on: July 30, 2019

Estimating encounter-habitat relationships with scale-integrated resource selection functions.

Michael E Egan¹, Nicole T Gorman¹, Storm Crews¹

¹Cooperative Wildlife Research Laboratory, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, USA.

The Journal of Animal Ecology

|June 28, 2024

Summary

Understanding animal encounters requires considering habitat selection at multiple scales. This new framework accurately predicts encounter hotspots, crucial for wildlife management and disease ecology.

Keywords:

disease encounter habitat selection predator–prey resource selection function scale

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Area of Science:

Ecology
Wildlife Biology
Spatial Analysis

Background:

Animal encounters are vital for ecological processes like predation and disease transmission.
Current methods for predicting encounters struggle to account for hierarchical habitat selection.
A formal framework is needed to link environmental factors to animal encounter probabilities.

Purpose of the Study:

To develop a scale-integrated framework for estimating the relative probability of animal encounters.
To relate landscape resources to encounter probabilities using a novel approach.
To improve spatial predictions of animal encounters for ecological applications.

Main Methods:

Developed a scale-integrated habitat selection framework to estimate encounter availability.
Utilized resource selection functions (RSFs) across four hierarchical scales.
Applied the method to white-tailed deer, elk, caribou, and coyote encounter data.

Main Results:

The scale-integrated RSFs accurately represented the relative probability of encounter.
Predicted encounter distributions more accurately captured novel encounters than single-scale or naive approaches.
Demonstrated the importance of accounting for conditional habitat selection in encounter modeling.

Conclusions:

The developed method provides a robust approach to modeling animal encounters across scales.
This framework is essential for understanding habitat's role in social and predator-prey dynamics.
Accurate encounter predictions are critical for managing disease transmission and ecological processes.