A generalist bird exhibits site-dependent resource selection

Quantifying resource selection (an organism’s disproportionate use of available resources) is essential to infer habitat requirements of a species, develop management recommendations, predict species responses to changing conditions, and improve our understanding of the processes that underlie ecological patterns. Because study sites, even within the same region, can differ in both the amount and the arrangement of cover types, our objective was to determine whether proximal sites can yield markedly different resource selection results for a generalist bird, northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus). We used five years of telemetry locations and newly developed land cover data at two, geographically distinct but relatively close sites in the south central semi-arid prairies of North America. We fit a series of generalized linear mixed models and used an information-theoretic model comparison approach to identify and compare resource selection patterns at each site. We determined that the ...