CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Landscape heterogeneity can often be represented as a series of discrete habitat orresource patches surrounded by a matrix of non-habitat. Understanding how animalsmove in such networks of patches is important for many theoretical and applied questions.The probability of going from one patch to another is affected in a non-trivial way by thecharacteristics and location of other patches in the network. Nearby patches can competeas possible destinations, and a particular patch can be shadowed by neighboring patches.We present a way to account for the effects of the spatial conﬁguration of patches inmodels of space use where individuals alternate between spending time in a patch andmoving to other patches in the network. The approach is based on the original derivationof Ovaskainen and Cornell (J Appl Probab 40:557?580, 2003) for a diffusion modelthat considered all possible ways in which an individual leaving a particular patch caneventually reach another patch before dying or leaving the patch network. By replacingthe theoretical results of Ovaskainen and Cornell by other appropriate functions, weprovide generality and thus make their approach useful in contexts where diffusion isnot a good approximation of movement. Furthermore, we provide ways to estimatetime spent in the non-habitat matrix when going from patch to patch and implement amethod to incorporate the effect of the history of previous visits on future patch use.We present an MCMC way to ﬁt these models to data and illustrate the approach withboth simulated data and data from sheep moving among seasonally ﬂooded meadows innorthern Patagonia.