Porter, W.P., J.L. Sabo, C.R. Tracy, O.J. Reichman, N. Ramankutty. Physiology on a landscape scale: plant-animal interactions. Integrative and comparative biology 42(3): 431-453.

Abstract:

We explore in this paper how animals can be affected by variation in climate, topography, vegetation characteristics, and body size. We utilize new spatially explicit state-of-the-art models that incorporate principles from heat and mass transfer engineering, physiology, morphology, and behavior that have been modified to function in a GIS context. We illustrate temporal and spatial impacts on elk energetics in burned and unburned stands of conifer in winter in Yellowstone National Park, Chuckwalla lizard distribution limits in North America, California Beechey Ground squirrel and Dusky Footed woodrat mass and energy requirements and activity patterns on the landscape, their predator prey interactions with a rattlesnake, Crotalus viridis, and shifts in that food web structure due to topographic and vegetative variation. We illustrate how different scales of data/observation provide different pieces of information that may collectively define the real distributions of a species. We perform sensitivity analyses of energetics due to variation in core temperature (fever) and climate warming (air temperature) and changes in activity overlap of predator and prey species and food web structure on the landscape due to changes in vegetation shade due to presence/absence or canopy density changes. Variation in slope and aspect affect variance in solar radiation incident on the ground, hence ground surface temperature, at the same elevation, same hourly 2m air temperatures, and wind speeds (latter half of this sentence is confusing). We illustrate visually how spatial effects and landscape heterogeneity make statistical descriptions of animal responses problematic, since multiple distributions of their responses to climate, topography, and vegetation on the landscape can yield the same descriptive statistics, especially at high (30 m) resolution.