期刊
JOURNAL OF ARID ENVIRONMENTS
卷 127, 期 -, 页码 160-170出版社
ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jaridenv.2015.11.011
关键词
Bighorn sheep; Fecal nitrogen; Forage; Mojave Desert
资金
- Golden Gate Chapter of Safari Club International
- National Park Service's Climate Change Response [PMIS 162673]
- Natural Resources [H8C07080001]
Diet quality influences ungulate population dynamics but is difficult to measure at fine temporal or spatial resolution using field-intensive methods such as fecal nitrogen (FN). Increasingly, the remotely sensed vegetation index NDVI is used to represent potential ungulate diet quality, but NDVI's relationship with diet quality has yet to be examined for herbivores in desert environments. We evaluated how strongly NDVI was associated with diet quality of desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni) in the Mojave Desert using FN data from multiple years and populations. We considered effects of temporal resolution, geographic variability, and NDVI spatial summary statistic on the NDVI-diet quality relationship. NDVI was more reliably associated with diet quality over the entire growing season than with instantaneous diet quality for a population. NDVI was also positively associated with population genetic diversity, a proxy for long-term, population-level effects of diet quality. We conclude that NDVI is a useful diet quality indicator for Mojave Desert bighorn sheep and potentially other desert ungulates. However, it may not reliably track diet quality if NDVI data are too spatially coarse to detect microhabitats providing high-quality forage, or if diet is strongly influenced by forage items that are weakly correlated with landscape greenness. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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