NR505 GIS Applications in Wildlife Sciences.ppt

* * * * * * * * * NR505 GIS Applications in Wildlife Sciences Mondays and Wednesdays 9:30 – 11:20 CNR GIS lab Room 26 Home Range Resource Selection Wildlife Habitat Models + Accuracy Assessment Fragmentation Analysis in Fragstats Distance Measurements and Least Cost Path Analysis Functional Connectivity Introductory Remote Sensing + separability testing /rsgis/nr504.htm Grading: Attendance Participation 60 % Final Project Presentation 40% Eva Strand CNR Remote Sensing and GIS Lab What is Home Range? The description of an animals space use The home range is believed to contain the essential requirements such as food, water and cover Wildlife Techniques Manual Home range characteristics Home ranges often overlap (as opposed to territories) Home range size has been correlated to body size Can help explain an animals biological patterns Can help improve understanding of ecological relationships Telemetry data or GPS collar Tabular data in Excel (2003) .dbf or .txt format can be directly imported to ArcGIS or ArcView Telemetry data or GPS collar Minimum Convex Polygon Harmonic Mean Kernal Jennrich-Turner Home Range Methods Minimum Convex Polygon (MCP) is defined as the polygon drawn around the outermost points Minimum Convex Polygon Fixed kernel home range is currently recommended Contours The size of the kernel home range is sensitive to the bandwidth value (h) used! Kernel Density Functions n – number of locations h – smoothing parameter d – distance from the location x, y ….a few assumptions Locations are independent Large enough sample size Smoothing parameter (kernel estimators) Bandwidth, h-factor, smoothing parameter Least Squares Cross Validation (LSCV) Currently recommended Tendency to undersmooth, creates multiple local minima High variability Likelihood Cross Validation (CV) Novel method (Horne and Garton 2006) Performs better for smaller sample sizes ( 50) Better fit and less variability Normal or Reference method (hr