Remotely-Sensed Game Trails Are a Behavioral Footprint That Explains Patterns of Herbivore Habitat Use.

ABSTRACT: Trade-offs between food acquisition and predator avoidance shape the landscape-scale movements of herbivores. These movements create landscape features, such as game trails, which are paths that animals use repeatedly to traverse the landscape. As such, these trails integrate behavioral trade-offs over space and time. Here, we used remotely sensed imagery to analyze the density of game trails with spatial environmental variables to understand landscape-scale patterns of herbivore habitat use in an African savanna. Woody plant cover was the best predictor of game trail density, with the highest densities correlating with intermediate woody plant cover. We also explored how patterns of game trail density compared to two known measures of herbivore habitat use (i.e., dung counts and maximum e

SUBMITTER: Stears K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11724211 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature