From home ranges to range-level connectivity: conservation and behavioral insights from GPS telemetry data

Understanding how animals use space and access key resources can offer critical insights that can inform management and conservation actions. This dissertation explores space use and movement behavior for three large mammalian species in South America at different scales and with different emphases. In Chapter 1, I study vicuña space use in the southern end of the species’ range and compare this with results from other parts of the vicuña range. My study offers the first estimates of vicuña home range sizes using telemetry data and compares these with results from previous studies. Additionally, I assess how vicuñas at my study site share space with conspecifics from other families, and if vicuñas display the strong territorial behavior displayed by the species in other parts of their range. Finally, I investigate how environmental factors may affect vicuña space use, including home range sizes, space-sharing and diel migration patterns. In Chapter 2, I study puma space use in three protected areas in the high Andean and Patagonian steppes and answer questions about the linkages between heterogeneity in the landscape and how pumas use space and move around in their home ranges. As a carnivore species known for its flexibility in adapting to very different habitat conditions, do pumas respond to differences in habitats and terrain factors with changes in behavior? What are the specific ways in which varying landscape variables affect this space use? Do different landscape factors affect behavior across study sites? Does changing landscape heterogeneity affect other factors such as distances moved by pumas? Chapter 3 comprises an assessment of connectivity between key jaguar habitats. First, I use a large, publicly available jaguar GPS telemetry dataset to develop a movement resistance layer, incorporating key environmental and anthropogenic variables known to facilitate or impede jaguar movement across the species’ range in the Americas. Next, I identify corridor areas connecting key jaguar habitats and other protected areas that are likely to be important from a jaguar conservation perspective across the jaguar range. These identified corridors may offer important strategic inputs towards range-level jaguar conservation strategies to ensure connectivity and dispersal between jaguar populations. Together, these analyses offer behavioral and ecological insights that can inform conservation and management actions for continued persistence of these species and their movement across landscapes