Data from: Genomics meets applied ecology: characterizing habitat quality for sloths in a tropical agroecosystem

Understanding how habitat quality in heterogeneous landscapes governs the
distribution and fitness of individuals is a fundamental aspect of
ecology. While mean individual fitness is generally considered a key to
assessing habitat quality, a comprehensive understanding of habitat
quality in heterogeneous landscapes requires estimates of dispersal rates
among habitat types. The increasing accessibility of genomic approaches,
combined with field-based demographic methods, provides novel
opportunities for incorporating dispersal estimation into assessments of
habitat quality. In this study, we integrated genomic kinship approaches
with field-based estimates of fitness components and Approximate Bayesian
Computation (ABC) procedures to estimate habitat-specific dispersal rates
and characterize habitat quality in two-toed sloths (Choloepus hoffmanni)
occurring in a Costa Rican agricultural ecosystem. Field-based
observations indicated that birth and survival rates were similar in a
sparsely-shaded cacao farm and adjacent cattle pasture-forest mosaic.
Sloth density was threefold higher in pasture compared to cacao, whereas
home range size and overlap were greater in cacao compared to pasture.
Dispersal rates were similar between the two habitats, as estimated using
ABC procedures applied to the spatial distribution of pairs of related
individuals identified using 3,431 SNP and 11 microsatellite locus
genotypes. Our results indicate that crops produced under a sparse
overstory can, in some cases, constitute lower quality habitat than
pasture-forest mosaics for sloths, perhaps because of differences in food
resources or predator communities. Finally, our study demonstrates that
integrating field-based demographic approaches with genomic methods can
provide a powerful means for characterizing habitat quality for animal
populations occurring in heterogeneous landscapes.