Habitat occupancy is the population limit of a given habitat. Habitat preference is the habitat most likely to be chosen by a species given the opportunity or which habitat the species is best suited for. Habitat usage is how a species manipulates its surroundings to better its odds of survival, how it interacts with its habitat. Habitat selection is the process by which a species chooses its habitat.

Dear Amila,

Kindly go through the following link. You may find it useful to get the answer for your query,

http://www.cfr.washington.edu/classes.esrm.450/Use.pdf

A nice intro/discussion in the literature of use versus availability is here :http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1198&context=usgsnpwrc

Since it's from 1980, some of the techniques may be a little dated but the background is still relevant..

Habitat occupancy is the population limit of a given habitat. Habitat preference is the habitat most likely to be chosen by a species given the opportunity or which habitat the species is best suited for. Habitat usage is how a species manipulates its surroundings to better its odds of survival, how it interacts with its habitat. Habitat selection is the process by which a species chooses its habitat.

Depend of group, therefore if it is a mammal, the behavioral is different of the a birds (e.g.).

Even within of mammal group there are differences, too great. The habitat of the occupancy, can be a simple site to Overnight, or in case bat species has a many sites, for example, a feed site, a Overnight site, foraging site, etc., therefore many possibilities exist.

Habitat preference is similar with habitat selection which is the place where animal selected from other envionment which suiltable for their living and with high quality resource to supply while habitat occupancy and habitat usage means the envionment animals actully taking up,it may be not their most suitable resource

Habitat preference refers to the habitat used by an organism within the whole available habitat. The proportion of the used habitat / available habitat is used to estimate habitat preference, for instance, though a compositional analysis. Therefore, the habitat usage (occupancy) and habitat availability are necessary to estimate habitat selection or preference.

Johnson, D. H. 1980 The comparison of usage and availability measurements for evaluating resource preference. Ecology 61, 65-71.

Hi, I like very much the Hall et al. (1997)'s article. There, they define some concepts you are referring in your question.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3783301

see  Michael L.Morrison, Bruce G.Marcot, R.William Mannan. 2006. Wildlife–Habitat Relationships, Concepts and Applications, Third Edition, ISLAND PRESS.

habitat: The physical space within which an organism lives, and the abiotic and biotic entities (e.g., resources) it uses and selects in that space. (Microhabitat and mesohabitat are relative terms referring to the grain size of the area over which habitat is being measured.)

habitat availability: The accessibility and use of physical and biological components in a habitat.

habitat avoidance: An oxymoron that should not be used; wherever an animal occurs defines its habitat.

habitat preference: Used to describe the relative use of different locations (habitats) by an individual or species.

habitat quality: The ability of the area to provide conditions appropriate for individual and population persistence.

habitat selection: A hierarchical process involving a series of innate and learned behavioral decisions made by an animal about what habitat it would use at different scales of the environment.

habitat use: The way an animal uses (or “consumes,” in a generic sense) a collection of physical and biological entities in a habitat.

I generally follow Garshelis 2000 (Chapter Delusions in Habitat Evaluation: Measuring Use, Selection, a...

The interpretation of occupancy varies depending on the scale of your investigation. At the coarse scale, occupancy is simply whether the combination of habitat features are suitable to support the presence/absence of an animal, i.e. the species distribution, whereas at smaller scales (< average home range) it can be considered a type of habitat selection.