Integrating animal tracking datasets at a continental scale for mapping wildlife habitat

 

The increasing availability of animal tracking datasets collected across many sites provides new opportunities to move beyond local assessments to enable detailed and consistent habitat mapping at biogeographic scales. However, integrating wildlife datasets across large areas and study sites is challenging, as species' varying responses to different environmental contexts must be reconciled. Here, we compare approaches for large-area habitat mapping and assess available habitat for a recolonizing large carnivore, the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx).

 

Location: Europe

 

 

We use a continental-scale animal tracking database (450 individuals from 14 study sites) to systematically assess modeling approaches, comparing (1) global strategies that pool all data for training vs. building local, site-specific models and combining them, (2) different approaches for incorporating regional variation in habitat selection, and (3) different modeling algorithms, testing nonlinear mixed effects models as well as machine-learning algorithms.

 

 

Both global and local modeling strategies allowed building transferable habitat models with overall similar predictive performance. Model performance was the highest using flexible machine-learning algorithms and when incorporating variation in habitat selection as a function of environmental variation. Our best-performing model used a weighted combination of local, site-specific habitat models. Our habitat maps identified large areas of suitable, but currently unoccupied lynx habitat, with many of the most suitable unoccupied areas located in regions that could foster connectivity between currently isolated populations.

 

 

We demonstrate that global and local modeling strategies can achieve robust habitat models at the continental scale and that considering regional variation in habitat selection improves broad-scale habitat mapping. More generally, we highlight the promise of large wildlife tracking databases for large-area habitat mapping. Our maps provide the first high-resolution, yet continental assessment of lynx habitat across Europe, providing a consistent basis for conservation planning for restoring the species within its former range.