Wild boar movement ecology across scales: Insights from a population expanding into agroecosystems of Southern Belgium ; Ecologie des mouvements du sanglier: cas d'une population en expansion dans un paysage agro-forestier du sud de la Belgique

Over the time, ungulates have seen their populations continuously changing under the e ect of direct, i.e. hunting pressure, and indirect, i.e. land-use changes, human activities. Under control until recently, ungulates have progressively adapted to these modi cations and are now able to cope with human-shaped environments, consequently their number and range have greatly and worryingly increased. More particularly, among ungulates species, the wild boar Sus scrofa raises important concerns due to its environmental, economic and social impacts on modern societies. Understanding the ecology of... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Morelle, Kevin
Dokumenttyp: doctoral thesis
Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
Verlag/Hrsg.: ULiège - Université de Liège
Schlagwörter: movement ecology / habitat selection / multi-scale / Life sciences / Environmental sciences & ecology / Sciences du vivant / Sciences de l’environnement & écologie
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27329592
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/183120

Over the time, ungulates have seen their populations continuously changing under the e ect of direct, i.e. hunting pressure, and indirect, i.e. land-use changes, human activities. Under control until recently, ungulates have progressively adapted to these modi cations and are now able to cope with human-shaped environments, consequently their number and range have greatly and worryingly increased. More particularly, among ungulates species, the wild boar Sus scrofa raises important concerns due to its environmental, economic and social impacts on modern societies. Understanding the ecology of ungulates species and their ability to survive within highly dynamic and seasonal ecosystems, such as agricultural environment, is thus necessary to better mitigate their negative impacts and to sustainably manage growing and expanding populations. Although only recently studied, movement ecology of animal is an important species trait that allows animal to adapt to rapid environmental changes. Considering movement as the resulting interaction of the animal’s internal state, navigation and motion capacity as well as of the e ect of the surrounding environment (“external factors”), provides a clear conceptual framework enabling to study patterns, mechanisms and processes, such as coping with land-use changes. In this thesis, we study the case of an expanding wild boar population in Southern Belgium and consider the movement ecology of the species to understand how wild boar colonize and ourish in agroecosystems. More speci cally, the thesis aims at i) reviewing quantitatively and qualitatively the scienti c literature about wild boar movement ecology, and ii) analyzing the spatial response of wild boar to agroecosystems in terms of movement and habitat selection across three spatial and temporal scales. The literature review highlights that wild boar is the least studied ungulates species in terms of movement ecology.We suggest that this is likely due i) to the relative complexity of tting tracking devices to this species, ...