Habitat selection of terrestrial mammals across scales

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Habitat selection may be the most studied feature of animal ecology; it also represents information crucial to the recovery of species declining due to habitat loss. Conclusions about habitat selection, however, are often sensitive to the scale -- the extent or resolution of our observations in space and time. Scale represents an impediment to drawing general conclusions across different study areas, populations, or species. This research will combine modelling and field studies of the habitat selection of northern mammals with two broad goals: (1) to develop and test a new "geostatistical model", a tool for revealing the scales at which animals respond to their environment and (2) to determine the habitat factors that affect imperiled caribou populations. Deleterious changes to caribou habitat are hypothesized to be caused by logging in the boreal forest (for threatened woodland caribou) and severe snow conditions in the High Arctic (for endangered Peary caribou).