Individual movements drive community-level space and resource use across Yellowstone ungulates

How similar species overlap in space and resource use within communities is a long-standing question in ecology. For mobile species, how individuals move shapes their resource use and interactions with other animals. Yet links between individual movements and community resource use remain underdeveloped as resource overlap is primarily assessed across species' diets, and individual movements are generally assessed within single species. Here, we bridge movement and community ecology by evaluating how individual movements influence resource use across a community of sympatric, migratory ungulates. Using remotely sensed environmental data and GPS locations of 5 ungulates in Yellowstone National Park, US (2016-2021), we show that variation of individual movements drove differences in community resource use, supporting the classic niche variation hypothesis. Species with lower between-individual variation in their movements (bighorn sheep and pronghorn) overlapped less in their resource use with other species than species with higher between-individual variation (elk, mule deer, and bison). The extent of resource-use overlap across species was determined by the daily and seasonal movements and habitat use of individuals. Tracking of plant phenology and snow conditions by individuals drove the use of, or exposure to, differing qualities of resources in different locations across species. Despite variation across species, Yellowstone ungulates were overall highly similar in their resource use, suggesting that interspecies competition was not a prominent driver of their resource use. Our findings confirm a strong link between individual movements and community resource use, underscoring the importance of individual behaviors in shaping communities.