Steury Lab

The influence of competition on spatial and temporal resource selection amongst a guild of mammalian predators

 Jesse T. Boulerice and Todd Steury

School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama 36849

Competition between mammalian carnivores is predicted to have important ecological consequences on an ecosystem by influencing the abundance, distribution, and behavior of species within a community.  Although competition is thought to be common, the wide-ranging, nocturnal, and secretive nature that exemplifies these species has made assessing competitive interactions difficult.  With the ubiquitous expansion of its North American range, the coyote has assumed the role of top predator in many of the communities it now inhabits and is expected to compete with co-occurring mesopredator species.  Although competition with coyotes is typically thought results in lowered abundances of mesopredators, changes in the use of space or time of the inferior competitor may also occur that can have an equal impact on the community.   Here, we use occupancy modeling to evaluate both spatial and temporal resource selection at a landscape level scale to assess competition between coyotes and five other common mesopredator species (bobcats, red foxes, gray foxes, raccoons, and opossums).  We expect that coyote competition will influence resource selection to some degree in all the mesopredators such that coyotes and coyote associated habitat variables will be selected against in space.  For those species with the higher degree of niche overlap with coyotes (ie. fox species), we also expect patterns of temporal resource selection that suggest a use  of time that reduces competition.   Because this approach allows us to investigate spatial and temporal resource selection over such a large landscape scale for several species at once, our results will represent an ecologically relevant and holistic perspective of coyote competition that few others have been able to achieve.

Alabama Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit (Auburn University) Inventory and Conservation Planning Project

In 2006, the Alabama Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Auburn University began the Inventory and Conservation Planning project (ICP).  This five year project was established to provide the state with scientific guidelines aimed at managing those species of Alabama in greatest conservation need (GCNs).  The creation of baseline inventory and repeatable protocols for monitoring GCNs are additional project objectives.  Encompassing 13 study sites on Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) lands across the state, surveys are being conducting on both aquatic and terrestrial species, including everything from mussels to mammals.

I am  responsible for the mammal division of the ICP project.  To meet the projects objectives, we have been monitoring study sites for all mammalian species using a combination of small mammal trapping, baited game cameras, and bat acoustics detectors.  This protocol allow us to survey the gamut of mammalian species thus establishing baseline inventories and a sampling methodology that can be repeated beyond the completion of the ICP project.  Detection of GCNs is obviously of high priority, and additional sampling regimes are being created to enhance our success of such for these rare species where needed.  At the end of sampling, we will have extensive records on the occupancy of Alabama’s mammalian species across the diversity of habitats within the state.