Habitat selection and the value of information in heterogenous landscapes

Despite the wide usage of the term information in evolutionary ecology, there is no general treatise between fitness (i.e., density-dependent population growth) and selection of the environment sensu lato. Here we (1) initiate the building of a quantitative framework with which to examine the relationship between information use in spatially heterogeneous landscapes and density-dependent population growth, and (2) illustrate its utility by applying the framework to an existing model of breeding habitat selection. We begin by linking information, as a process of narrowing choice, to population growth/fitness. Second, we define a measure of a population’s penalty of ignorance based on the Kullback-Leibler index that combines the contributions of resource selection (i.e., biased use of breeding sites) and density-dependent depletion. Third, we quantify the extent to which environmental heterogeneity (i.e., mean and variance within a landscape) constrains sustainable population growth of un...