Dynamic balancing of risks and rewards in a large herbivore: Further extending predator-prey concepts to road ecology

Animal behavior is shaped by the ability to identify risks and profitably balance the levels of risks encountered with the payoffs experienced. Anthropogenic disturbances like roads generate novel risks and opportunities that wildlife must accurately perceive and respond to. Basic concepts in predator-prey ecology are often used to understand responses of animals to roads (e.g., increased vigilance, selection for cover in their vicinity). However, prey often display complex behaviors such as modulating space use given varying risks and rewards, and it is unclear if such dynamic balancing is used by animals in the context of road crossings.
We tested whether animals dynamically balance risks and rewards relative to roads using extensive field -based and GPS collar data from elk in Yoho National Park (British Columbia, Canada) where a major highway completely bisects their range during most of the year.
We analyzed elk behavior by combining hidden Markov movement models with a step-select..., Data have been collected and processed following Poulin et al. (2023) \"Dynamic balancing of risks and rewards in a large herbivore: further extending predator-prey concepts to road ecology\", published in Journal of Animal Ecology. More information on the archived datasets, code and GIS layers can be found in the README.md file., Program R is required to open the datasets (which are .rds files), as well as the R Markdown code file (.rmd file). The vegetation layers are .tif layers, which can be open in R and/or in other GIS programs.