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Mesoscale movement and recursion behaviors of Namibian black rhinos
BACKGROUND: Understanding rhino movement behavior, especially their recursive movements, holds significant promise for enhancing rhino conservation efforts, and protecting their habitats and the biodiversity they support. Here we investigate the daily, biweekly, and seasonal recursion behavior of rh...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6842456/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31728193 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40462-019-0176-2 |
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author | Seidel, Dana Paige Linklater, Wayne L. Kilian, Werner Preez, Pierre du Getz, Wayne M. |
author_facet | Seidel, Dana Paige Linklater, Wayne L. Kilian, Werner Preez, Pierre du Getz, Wayne M. |
author_sort | Seidel, Dana Paige |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Understanding rhino movement behavior, especially their recursive movements, holds significant promise for enhancing rhino conservation efforts, and protecting their habitats and the biodiversity they support. Here we investigate the daily, biweekly, and seasonal recursion behavior of rhinos, to aid conservation applications and increase our foundational knowledge about these important ecosystem engineers. METHODS: Using relocation data from 59 rhinos across northern Namibia and 8 years of sampling efforts, we investigated patterns in 24-h displacement at dawn, dusk, midday, and midnight to examine movement behaviors at an intermediate scale and across daily behavioral modes of foraging and resting. To understand recursion patterns across animals’ short and long-term ranges, we built T-LoCoH time use grids to estimate recursive movement by each individual. Comparing these grids to contemporaneous MODIS imagery, we investigated productivity’s influence on short-term space use and recursion. Finally, we investigated patterns of recursion within a year’s home range, measuring the time to return to the most intensively used patches. RESULTS: Twenty four-hour displacements at dawn were frequently smaller than 24-h displacements at dusk or at midday and midnight resting periods. Recursion analyses demonstrated that short-term recursion was most common in areas of median rather than maximum NDVI values. Investigated across a full year, recursion analysis showed rhinos most frequently returned to areas within 8–21 days, though visits were also seen separated by months likely suggesting seasonality in range use. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that rhinos may frequently stay within the same area of their home ranges for days at a time, and possibly return to the same general area days in a row especially during morning foraging bouts. Recursion across larger time scales is also evident, and likely a contributing mechanism for maintaining open landscapes and browsing lawns of the savanna. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6842456 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-68424562019-11-14 Mesoscale movement and recursion behaviors of Namibian black rhinos Seidel, Dana Paige Linklater, Wayne L. Kilian, Werner Preez, Pierre du Getz, Wayne M. Mov Ecol Research BACKGROUND: Understanding rhino movement behavior, especially their recursive movements, holds significant promise for enhancing rhino conservation efforts, and protecting their habitats and the biodiversity they support. Here we investigate the daily, biweekly, and seasonal recursion behavior of rhinos, to aid conservation applications and increase our foundational knowledge about these important ecosystem engineers. METHODS: Using relocation data from 59 rhinos across northern Namibia and 8 years of sampling efforts, we investigated patterns in 24-h displacement at dawn, dusk, midday, and midnight to examine movement behaviors at an intermediate scale and across daily behavioral modes of foraging and resting. To understand recursion patterns across animals’ short and long-term ranges, we built T-LoCoH time use grids to estimate recursive movement by each individual. Comparing these grids to contemporaneous MODIS imagery, we investigated productivity’s influence on short-term space use and recursion. Finally, we investigated patterns of recursion within a year’s home range, measuring the time to return to the most intensively used patches. RESULTS: Twenty four-hour displacements at dawn were frequently smaller than 24-h displacements at dusk or at midday and midnight resting periods. Recursion analyses demonstrated that short-term recursion was most common in areas of median rather than maximum NDVI values. Investigated across a full year, recursion analysis showed rhinos most frequently returned to areas within 8–21 days, though visits were also seen separated by months likely suggesting seasonality in range use. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that rhinos may frequently stay within the same area of their home ranges for days at a time, and possibly return to the same general area days in a row especially during morning foraging bouts. Recursion across larger time scales is also evident, and likely a contributing mechanism for maintaining open landscapes and browsing lawns of the savanna. BioMed Central 2019-11-09 /pmc/articles/PMC6842456/ /pubmed/31728193 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40462-019-0176-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Research Seidel, Dana Paige Linklater, Wayne L. Kilian, Werner Preez, Pierre du Getz, Wayne M. Mesoscale movement and recursion behaviors of Namibian black rhinos |
title | Mesoscale movement and recursion behaviors of Namibian black rhinos |
title_full | Mesoscale movement and recursion behaviors of Namibian black rhinos |
title_fullStr | Mesoscale movement and recursion behaviors of Namibian black rhinos |
title_full_unstemmed | Mesoscale movement and recursion behaviors of Namibian black rhinos |
title_short | Mesoscale movement and recursion behaviors of Namibian black rhinos |
title_sort | mesoscale movement and recursion behaviors of namibian black rhinos |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6842456/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31728193 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40462-019-0176-2 |
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