4.7 Article

Tracking animal movement by comparing trace element signatures in claws to spatial variability of elements in soils

期刊

SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT
卷 468, 期 -, 页码 699-705

出版社

ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2013.08.091

关键词

Animal movement; Trace elements; Element base-map; sPCA; American badgers; Taxidea taxus jacksoni

资金

  1. Ministry of Natural Resources
  2. Ontario Graduate Scholarship
  3. Species at Risk Research Fund for Ontario/World Wildlife Fund
  4. Species at Risk Stewardship Fund
  5. Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

向作者/读者索取更多资源

Biogeochemical markers in ecology have provided a useful means for indicating geographic origin and movement patterns of species on various temporal and spatial scales. We used trace element analysis to resolve spatial and habitat-specific environmental gradients in elemental distributions that could be used to infer geographic origin and habitat association in a model terrestrial carnivore: American badger (Taxidea taxus jacicsoni). To accomplish this, we generated element base-maps using spatial principal component analysis, and assessed habitat-specific signatures using multivariate statistics from soil element concentrations in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Using canonical correlation analysis (CCA) we also test whether element variability in the claw keratin of a terrestrial carnivore could be explained by the chemical variability in the soils of the local environment. Results demonstrated that trace element signatures in soils vary locally with land use practices and soil texture type and broadly with the underlying geology. CCA results suggest that chemical profiles in claws can be linked to the surrounding chemical environment, providing evidence that geographic patterns in mammalian movement can be discerned on the basis of claw chemistry. From this, we conclude that geographic assignment of individuals based on element profiles in their tissues and referenced against soil elemental distributions would be coarse (at a spatial scale of 100-1000 km, depending on the chemical heterogeneity of the landscape), but could be used to assess origin of highly mobile animals or habitat association of individuals. Compared to stable isotope analysis, the assessment of trace elements can provide a much greater level of detail in backcasting animal movement pathways. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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