Journal
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Volume 10, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-63312-0
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Funding
- Norwegian Environment Agency
- NOF-BirdLife Norway's Snowy owl Foundation
- Environment departments at the Office of the County Governors of Troms and Finnmark, Trondelag, Innlandet
- Vestfold and Telemark
- Oslo and Viken
- Nordland and Vestland
- Polar Continental Shelf Project
- Garfield-Weston Foundation
- Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Fonds Quebecois de Recherche en Nature et Technologies
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [203177]
- Kidd Biological Inc
- Alaska Department of Fish and Game
- Arctic Raptors Inc
- HWA Wildlife Consulting
- Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior
- Hawk Mountain Sanctuary
- Canada Research Chair program
- Slovene Human Resources Development and Scholarship Fund
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Migratory species display a range of migration patterns between irruptive (facultative) to regular (obligate), as a response to different predictability of resources. In the Arctic, snow directly influences resource availability. The causes and consequences of different migration patterns of migratory species as a response to the snow conditions remains however unexplored. Birds migrating to the Arctic are expected to follow the spring snowmelt to optimise their arrival time and select for snow-free areas to maximise prey encounter en-route. Based on large-scale movement data, we compared the migration patterns of three top predator species of the tundra in relation to the spatio-temporal dynamics of snow cover. The snowy owl, an irruptive migrant, the rough-legged buzzard, with an intermediary migration pattern, and the peregrine falcon as a regular migrant, all followed, as expected, the spring snowmelt during their migrations. However, the owl stayed ahead, the buzzard stayed on, and the falcon stayed behind the spatio-temporal peak in snowmelt. Although none of the species avoided snow-covered areas, they presumably used snow presence as a cue to time their arrival at their breeding grounds. We show the importance of environmental cues for species with different migration patterns.
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