The ecology of small rodent food selection is poorly understood, as mammalian herbivore food selection theory has mainly been developed by studying ungulates. Especially, the effect of food availability on food selection in natural habitats where a range of food items are available is unknown. We studied diets and selectivity of grey-sided voles (Myodes rufocanus) and tundra voles (Microtus oeconomus), ...

The Arctic is under great pressure due to climate change. Drones are increasingly used as a tool in ecology and may be especially valuable in rapidly changing and remote landscapes, as can be found in the Arctic. For effective applications of drones, decisions of both ecological and technical character are needed. Here, we provide our method planning workflow for generating ground-cover maps with ...

Occupancy models have been extended to account for either multiple spatial scales or species interactions in a dynamic setting. However, as interacting species (e.g., predators and prey) often operate at different spatial scales, including nested spatial structure might be especially relevant to models of interacting species. Here we bridge these two model frameworks by developing a multi-scale, ...

The arctic tundra is most sensitive to climate change. The change can be quantified from observations of the fauna, flora and weather conditions. To do observations at sufficient spatial and temporal resolution, ground-based observation nodes with sensors are needed. However, the arctic tundra is resource-limited with regards to energy, data networks, and humans. There are also regulatory and practical ...

Understanding drivers of space use and habitat selection is essential for management and conservation, especially under rapid environmental change. Here, we develop summer and winter habitat suitability models for the endemic wild Svalbard reindeer (Rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus). The High Arctic Svalbard tundra is currently subject to the fastest temperature increases on Earth, and reindeer ...

During the last decade, methods based on high-throughput sequencing such as DNA metabarcoding have opened up for a range of new questions in animal dietary studies. One of the major advantages of dietary metabarcoding resides in the potential to infer a quantitative relationship between sequence read proportions and biomass of ingested food. However, this relationship’s robustness is highly dependent ...

The temporal dynamics of most tundra food webs are shaped by the cyclic population dynamics of lemmings. While processes during winter may be behind the recent disruptions of lemming cycles, lemming winter ecology is poorly known. We present here the first DNA metabarcoding data on the winter diet of Norwegian lemmings (Lemmus lemmus), based on feces collected after a winter of population ...

Camera traps have become popular for monitoring biodiversity, but the huge amounts of image data that arise from camera trap monitoring represent a challenge and artificial intelligence is increasingly used to automatically classify large image data sets. However, it is still challenging to combine automatic classification with other steps and tools needed for efficient, quality-assured and adaptive ...