Description
Home-range studies have received considerable attention from ecologist but are greatly skewed towards the north temperate areas. Tropical areas offer ideal setting to tease apart multiple hypotheses of weather, food and social interactions as important factors influencing home-range. In this study we investigate home range and movement patterns of tropical Red-capped Lark, a year round breeding bird with a changing social structure whose general ecology is poorly studied by tracking and color reading rings during a 23 month period for the period August 2014 - June 2016. Our objective was to study year round variation home range and movement in their highly aseasonal and unpredictable weather and resource variation experienced in their equatorial habitats with the birds changing social structure and year round breeding. The spacing behavior and distribution within the habitat varied between months due to the social-spatial change between gregarious groupings outside breeding to pair formation during breeding. Red-capped Larks had a mean home range size of 48.58 ha but largely varied between individuals (range 2.12 -129.48 ha). Breeding and vegetation were the main factors explaining home range size while movement was influenced also by breeding and by ambient temperature. We also show for the first time the influence of breeding on non-breeders. Our study shows the importance of conducting more studies on the tropical areas. The result of this study suggests the influence of breeding birds may have considerable effects on home range of non-breeding birds and variation of home range may act more strongly at the population level than at the individual level.Periode | 13-feb.-2018 |
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Evenementstitel | Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting 2018 |
Evenementstype | Conference |
Conferentienummer | 11 |
Organisator | Netherlands Ecological Research Network (NERN) |
Locatie | Lunteren, NetherlandsToon op kaart |
Mate van erkenning | National |