animal movement

In New Zealand, intensive, site-based conservation management of bird species is often focused on controlling threats from invasive species at a local scale. Such management may benefit species resident within the site but may be insufficient for mobile taxa whose movements extend beyond it through annual migrations, irregular nomadic movements, or exchanges of dispersing individuals in metapopulation networks.

Restoration initiatives of ecosystems transformed by human actions require optimisation of eradication measures of introduced species, particularly in fragile insular ecosystems. We studied aspects of the spatial ecology of introduced feral cats (Felis catus) on subantarctic Auckland Island of New Zealand to assist eradication efforts of pests from this remote, biologically rich island. Firstly, we estimated home range sizes and identified core areas of activity based on movement-rooted dynamic Brownian bridge models.

The European hedgehog is a significant predator species of rare and endangered ground-nesting birds in the riverbeds of the Waitaki Basin, South Island, New Zealand. Studies focusing on the movements and habits of this species have generally been limited to broad-scale radio-tracking studies or incidental trap-catch data. Within our study, we aimed to investigate the finer scale movement patterns of the hedgehog in relation to vegetation structure by using spool-and-thread tracking.