Spatiotemporal variation in disturbance impacts derived from simultaneous tracking of aircraft and shorebirds

1. Assessing impacts of disturbance over large areas and long time periods is crucial for nature management, but also challenging since impacts depend on both wildlife responses to disturbance and on the spatiotemporal distribution of disturbance sources. Combined tracking of animals and disturbance sources enables quantification of wildlife responses as a function of the distance to a disturbance source. We provide a framework to derive such distance-response curves and combine those with disturbance source presence data to quantify energetic costs of disturbance at a landscape scale. 2. We tracked 90 Eurasian Oystercatchers Haematopus ostralegus and all aircraft in a military training area in the Dutch Wadden Sea. We quantified distance-response curves estimating flight probability and additional displacement for five types of aircraft activities, by comparing bird movement prior to aircraft presence with movement during aircraft presence. We then used the distance-response curves to ...