Understanding animal movement behaviour in dynamic agricultural landscapes

Movement is one of the key mechanisms for animals to deal with changes within their habitats. Therefore, resource variability can impact animals’ home range formation, especially in spatially and temporally highly dynamic landscapes, such as farmland. However, the movement response to resource variability might depend on the underlying landscape structure. We investigated whether a given landscape structure affects the level of home range size adaptation in response to resource variability. We tested whether increasing resource variability forces herbivorous mammals to increase their home ranges. Hares in simple landscapes showed increasing home range sizes with increasing resource variability, whereas hares in complex landscapes did not enlarge their home range. Animals in complex landscapes have the possibility to include various landscape elements within their home ranges and are more resilient against resource variability. But animals in simple landscapes with few elements experience shortcomings when resource variability becomes high. The increase in home range size, the movement related increase in energy expenditure, and a decrease in hare abundances can have severe implications for conservation of mammals in anthropogenic landscapes. Hence, conservation management could benefit from a better knowledge about fine-scaled effects of resource variability on movement behaviour.

移动是动物应对栖息地环境变化的关键机制之一。资源可变性会对动物的家域（home range）形成产生影响，尤其在时空高度动态的景观（如农田）中更是如此。然而，动物对资源可变性的移动响应可能取决于其所处的潜在景观结构。本研究探究了特定景观结构是否会影响家域大小对资源可变性的适应程度，并验证了资源可变性升高是否会促使植食性哺乳动物扩大其家域。研究结果表明，栖息于简单景观中的野兔，其家域大小会随资源可变性升高而增大；而栖息于复杂景观中的野兔则未扩大家域。复杂景观中的动物可将多种景观要素纳入家域范围，对资源波动的抗干扰能力更强；但景观要素匮乏的简单景观中的动物，在资源可变性升高时会面临生存劣势。家域扩大、移动相关的能量消耗增加，以及野兔种群丰度下降，均会对人为景观下的哺乳动物保护工作造成严重影响。因此，深入了解资源可变性对移动行为的精细尺度效应，能够为保护管理工作提供有益的参考。