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Estimating the spatial scales of landscape effects on abundance

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Abstract

Context

Spatial variation in abundance is influenced by local- and landscape-level environmental variables, but modeling landscape effects is challenging because the spatial scales of the relationships are unknown. Current approaches involve buffering survey locations with polygons of various sizes and using model selection to identify the best scale. The buffering approach does not acknowledge that the influence of surrounding landscape features should diminish with distance, and it does not yield an estimate of the unknown scale parameters.

Objectives

The purpose of this paper is to present an approach that allows for statistical inference about the scales at which landscape variables affect abundance.

Methods

Our method uses smoothing kernels to average landscape variables around focal sites and uses maximum likelihood to estimate the scale parameters of the kernels and the effects of the smoothed variables on abundance. We assessed model performance using a simulation study and an avian point count dataset.

Results

The simulation study demonstrated that estimators are unbiased and produce correct confidence interval coverage except in the rare case in which there is little spatial autocorrelation in the landscape variable. Canada warbler abundance was more highly correlated with site-level measures of NDVI than landscape-level NDVI, but the reverse was true for elevation. Canada warbler abundance was highest when elevation in the surrounding landscape, defined by an estimated Gaussian kernel, was between 1300 and 1400 m.

Conclusions

Our method provides a rigorous way of formally estimating the scales at which landscape variables affect abundance, and it can be embedded within most classes of statistical models.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Samuel Merker and Anna Joy Lehmicke for collecting the point count data. Paige Howell provided useful suggestions and comments on a previous version of the manuscript. Two anonymous reviewers provided insightful comments that improved the manuscript. Permission to conduct research within and around the Coweeta Basin Hydrologic Laboratory was granted by the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory, the USDA Forest Service, and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. JHC was supported by the Coweeta LTER, NSF Grant DEB-0823293.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of Georgia, 180 E. Green Street, Athens, GA, 30602-2152, USA

    Richard Chandler & Jeffrey Hepinstall-Cymerman

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  1. Richard Chandler
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  2. Jeffrey Hepinstall-Cymerman
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Correspondence to Richard Chandler.

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Chandler, R., Hepinstall-Cymerman, J. Estimating the spatial scales of landscape effects on abundance. Landscape Ecol 31, 1383–1394 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-016-0380-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-016-0380-z

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