Abstract
AbstractMountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) are among the least studied North American ungulates. Aided by successful translocations from the early to mid‐1900s, introduced populations have greatly expanded within non‐native ranges, yet there remains a paucity of empirical studies concerning their habitat requirements and potential distributions. The lack of studies presents a formidable challenge to managers tasked with monitoring mountain goat expansion and mitigating for any potential negative impacts posed to native species and communities. We constructed summer and winter resource selection models using GPS data collected during 2011–2014 from 18 (14 female and four male) mountain goats in the Snake River Range of the southwest Greater Yellowstone Area. We used generalized linear mixed models and evaluated landscape and environmental covariates at multiple spatial grains (i.e., neighborhood analyses within 30‐, 100‐, 500‐, and 1000‐m buffers) within four related suites. The multi‐grain resource selection function greatly improved model fit, indicating that mountain goat resource selection was grain dependent in both seasons. In summer, mountain goats largely selected rugged and steep areas at high elevations and avoided high solar radiation, canopy cover, and time‐integrated normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). In winter, mountain goats selected lower elevations characterized by steep and rugged slopes on warm aspects and avoided areas with high canopy cover, NDVI amplitude, and snow water equivalent. Slope was the dominant predictor of habitat use in both seasons, although mountain goats selected for steeper slopes in winter than in summer. Regional extrapolations depicted suitable mountain goat habitat in the Snake River, Teton, Gros Ventre, Wyoming, and Salt Ranges centered around steep and rugged areas. Winter range was generally characterized by the steepest slopes within a more broadly distributed and generally less steep summer range. Further research should examine the spatial and temporal overlap with native populations to further our understanding of resource selection dynamics and the potential for introduced mountain goats to alter intraguild behavioral processes of sympatric species, namely the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis canadensis).
Highlights
Mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus), because of their propensity to inhabit rugged and remote terrain, are among the least studied NorthAmerican ungulates (Festa-Bianchet and Co^te 2008)
Because we evaluated similar indices for some covariates (e.g., NDVI amplitude (NDVIAmp) and NDVITin), we again used univariate models and AICc to select between similar indices in tier two
Data collection, censoring, and definitions Capture efforts began in the summer of 2011 and continued to the spring of 2014, resulting in the instrumentation of 18 mountain goats (14 female and four male; Appendix S2) with GPS and very high frequency (VHF) collar pairs
Summary
Mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus), because of their propensity to inhabit rugged and remote terrain, are among the least studied NorthAmerican ungulates (Festa-Bianchet and Co^te 2008). The paucity of empirical studies is most pronounced in the southern portions of their range where mountain goats are considered non-native according to reviews of archeological,. Mountain goats are native to northwestern North America, primarily occurring within coastal and inland mountains west of the continental divide from southern Alaska, USA, through the Yukon Territories, Alberta, and British Columbia, Canada, and into the northwestern United States (Festa-Bianchet and Co^te 2008). While the majority of mountain goats occur within their native range, the general range expansion within non-native regions has highlighted the need for empirical studies that investigate their ecological roles and management concerns. The possibility for competition (Reed 2001) and disease transmission (Gross 2001) with native Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis canadensis) is an important, but unevaluated concern throughout non-native ranges
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