Data from: Movement-integrated habitat selection reveals wolves balance ease of travel with human avoidance in a risk-reward trade-off

Anthropogenic linear features often alter wildlife behaviour and movement.
Landscape features, such as habitat, can have important mediating effects
on wildlife response to disturbance and yet are rarely explicitly
considered in how habitat and disturbance interact. We tested the
movement and space-use responses of GPS-collared wolves to linear features
with respect to adjacent habitat variation. We simultaneously modeled wolf
movement and selection within a conditional logistic regression framework
(integrated Step Selection Analysis). We explicitly considered how
adjacent habitat alters these responses through putative effects such as
movement friction. Classifying linear features based on the
selection and movement response of wolves revealed that pairing
transmission lines and primary roads increased the avoidance response to
be greater than either feature on their own and provided evidence of a
semi-permeable barrier to movement. In contrast, features with reduced
human activity, including secondary and tertiary roads were highly
selected for and function as movement corridors. Synthesis and
applications: Explicitly parameterizing adjacent habitats provides
evidence that where a linear feature is routed and which habitats it
interacts with will have the greatest implications for wolf behavioural
responses. Reduced avoidance behaviour in highly risky environments
signifies the importance of habitat for maintaining landscape
connectivity, particularly when routing multiple different features
parallel and near each other. Increased vegetation density along linear
features also reduced movement advantages putatively by increasing
friction, indicating that actively decommissioning other features such as
secondary roads could be an effective mitigation strategy for reducing
wolf encounters with prey. Knowing the influence of adjacent habitats on
the likelihood of wolves selecting for a given linear feature creates a
context to minimize the impact of new anthropogenic features on behaviour.