I am studying the effects of landscape metrics on Caucasian grouse breeding display site selection. One of independent variables I am interested to know its role is the impact of human residential population size. But I do not know how to make a relationship between population size variable and habitat selection with increasing distance from residential areas. I would be pleased to get the opinion of my colleagues in this regards.
Hi. So it seems that there is one response (site selection) and 2 independent variables (distance to residential areas and human population size). I think you can do a multiple regression analysis here (it is easy to do in R). Do you have presence/absence data of grouse in your landscape? if so, you can use occupancy models, it is an extremely useful tool to investigate site occupancy and habitat relationships, that also controls for detectation errors (false absences) of grouse. Check papers by Mackenzie and Nichols 2003, and also the book by Mackenzie (2006). Cheers!
Hi, Albert, Thanks so much for your elaborated explanation and your recommendation papers. I think that my inquiry was a little ambiguous. My study area includes a number of residential areas (rural) with different population size that are distributed unequally from the grouse sites. Do you think that we can generate fuzzy map with population size across study region?Thank you
Hi! I am not good at doing maps, but yes, you should generate one! maybe a density map, with more populated areas in red colour and less populated areas in green, with a gradual change in color between them. That would be a nice figure! Probably with ArcGis or R you can do it, but I have no clue how (but there are good R forums about maps).
As Albert pointed out, occupancy modelling is especially useful since it can remove confounding effects of variable detectability and uneven sampling. However, it does require replication to allow estimation of detectability, and the sites cannot change (occupied to unoccupied, or vice versa) over replicates. To derive population size as a predictor, this is probably best done in a GIS prior to your actual modelling.
I would like know little more about the question. The distance increase more towards natural breeding site ( natural habitat). Habitat selection parameters are well defined. Develop a correlation with abiotic factor the controls the breeding of caucasian grouse incorporating the decimating human factors for breeding grouse.
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